injured,--phrases are capable of so many interpretations,--that even
serious people use slang in a very pathetic way without ever knowing the
words are slang. Girls not only hurt themselves, but go to work to
defame the very English language and the people who speak English.

When a young woman, who makes much pretension to fine manners and an
elegant education, takes the steam-car for a rostrum, and exclaims
about her French teacher as "awfully funny but awfully horrid, don't
you know; awfully lovely sometimes, but awfully awful at others!" we
wonder why she gives so much attention to French when her English
vocabulary seems to have reduced itself to the scanty proportions of
one word. Oh, I know how pertinent certain kinds of slang are! I
acknowledge that a few peculiar expressions convey ideas more
emphatically than whole pages of classical English.

The dangers from the habitual use of slang cannot be too strongly
presented. Imagine a girl of the period versed in the loose expressions
of the day. She goes away; but, after an absence of five years in a
country where she hears little except in a foreign tongue, she returns,
and with her comes her slang. How common, how witless, her talk appears!
Her slang has long since gone out of fashion. The best of English never
changes its style.

Girls, especially very young girls, must have their secret signs, their
language of nods and becks and shrugs; but young ladies who have
outgrown "eni, meni, moni, mi; husca, lina, bona, stri," ought to
outgrow signs which are suggestive of coarse, rude acts, and which,
with the slang expressions that accompany them, have often originated
in some theatre of questionable character.