Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/855

Rh Some of the expressions are very descriptive. To run from a police officer is to do a hotfoot. A person who is always listening to other people's conversation is called a rubber-neck. The word push, meaning a crowd, is occasionally seen in the newspapers. To be arrested is to be pinched; to be convicted is to fall. To refuse a person's appeal is to give him the marble heart. Such expressions require no explanation.

There is a disposition among all uneducated people to use a single verb both in a transitive and an intransitive sense. The verb "to learn" is used very commonly for "to teach." "To set" is used for "to sit," and "lay" for "lie." In the argot the same rule applies. The verbs to kill and to die are both expressed by the one term "to croak," and the grim humor of the class appears in the word croaker, which means doctor. The argot has no syntax; in the verbs there is scarcely any distinction of tense. The present tense is used for the imperfect and for the past. "I win a dollar" may mean I am winning a dollar, but it is equally probable that it means I won a dollar or I have won a dollar. There seems to be an effort to eliminate everything possible from the language, to reduce its vocabulary to the minimum. It is a natural endeavor for a listless and enervated people. In some cases there may be an attempt to use the past form of the verb, but the formation is very apt to be incorrect, although regular. Thus the grotesque terms used by children as "bringed," "catched," and even strange plurals and comparatives as "foots" and "worser," are very commonly found.

This dialect has, as we have been shown, mutilated the mother tongue; it has also borrowed liberally from other languages, but without method or etymology. Criminals are not grammarians. Neither are they linguists, and at first sight it would seem strange that they should import words from other countries. We will find, however, that in any prison the percentage of inmates of foreign -birth will be large; in America it is about fifteen per cent. A foreign expression which seems apt or an improvement on the one in present use is rapidly diffused through the prison. In cases where it is especially descriptive it may become permanent, but its life is usually short. The argot of the crime class changes materially every two or three years. It is ephemeral, as shifting as its users. Victor Hugo exaggerates only slightly when he says, "The argot changes more in ten years than the language does in ten centuries."

This mutability is common to all languages, but recognized tongues change more slowly—in a generation, not in a year. Words are born, live, and die as we do. They have their youth, their virility, their old age, and their second childhood. They have a reason, there is an element of reflection which