Page:EB1911 - Volume 25.djvu/224

Rh to be used mainly on account of its intrinsic merit, and not because it is a wrong word, it is already ceasing to be slang. So long as the usage of good society continues to proscribe it, it may be called a vulgarism; but unless the need which it serves is supplied in some other way, it is likely to find its way into the standard speech.

The account here given of the distinctive characteristics of slang conflicts with the view of those writers who so define the term as to make it include all words and uses of words that are current only among persons belonging to some particular class, trade or profession. But such an extended application of the word is not supported by general usage. It is true that it is not uncommon to apply the name of slang to the technical language of trades and professions, or even of arts and sciences. This, however, is really a consciously metaphorical use, and is intended to convey the imputation that the employment of technical language has no better motive than the desire to be unintelligible to the uninitiated, to or excite admiration by a display of learning. If the imputation were true, the designation would be strictly applicable. Technical and scientific terms may justly be stigmatized as slang when they are used pretentiously without any good reason, but not when they are chosen because, to those who understand them, they afford a clearer, more precise, or more convenient expression of the meaning than is found in the ordinary vocabulary. At the same time, it is true that every trade or profession has a real slang of its own; that is to say, a body of peculiar words and expressions that serve as flippant or undignified substitutes for the terms that are recognized as correct. It happens not infrequently that words of this kind, owing to frequency of use and] the development of specific meanings, lose the character of slang and pass into the category of accepted technicalities.

A class of words that has a certain affinity with slang, though admitting of being clearly distinguished from it, consists of those which are proscribed from the intercourse of reputable society because they express too plainly ideas that are deemed indelicate, or because they are brutally insulting. Such words share with slang the characteristic that they are ordinarily employed only in intentional defiance of propriety; they differ from it in being really part of the original vernacular, and not of an artificial vocabulary which is substituted for it. The customary euphemisms which take the place of these condemned words are, of course, far removed from slang; but the name is strictly applicable to those grotesque metaphors which are sometimes substituted, and emphasize the offensiveness of the notion instead of veiling it.