Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/139

 low, crawling, poisonous, and vile. At the bottom of misery and misfortune lies a reptilian instinct ever ready to strike at “‘fortunate facts and reigning rights.” The venom of this instinct is slang. The venom is an excretion of social deformities and human infirmities—ideas are congenitally diseased; they are born exuding foul humors; these humors infect manners and distort events. Civilization has a skin-disease; it is covered with eruption; it is subject to boils and it is eroded by ulcers. The boil may be a king, the ulcer a financier, the burrowing microbe a thief, and the itch may be a liar or a social climber with a well-paid publicity staff. There are blistering marriages, flaying divorces, abrasions called battles, and burns called public men—many of them worse than “public women.” Some of these ills are superficial, and others are symptoms of deep-seated disease. All these things produce suffering. Suffering causes wretchedness; and wretchedness speaks slang.