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profession for the never-ending toil it
imposed, by miscalling it, with grim pleasantry, the architecture of the
nursery. Finite and quite rigid words are not, in any sense that holds
good of bricks. They move and change, they wax and wane, they wither
and burgeon; from age to age, from place to place, from mouth to
mouth, they are never at a stay. They take on colour, intensity, and
vivacity from the infection of neighbourhood; the same word is of
several shapes and diverse imports in one and the same sentence; they
depend on the building that they compose for the very chemistry of the
stuff that composes them. The same epithet is used in the phrases "a
fine day" and "fine irony," in "fair trade" and "a fair goddess." Were
different symbols to be invented for these sundry meanings the art of
literature would perish. For words carry with them all the meanings
they have worn, and the writer shall be judged by those that he selects
for prominence in the train of his thought. A slight technical
implication, a faint tinge of archaism, in the common turn of speech
that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that
scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of
ticket-holders with closed doors. A single natural phrase of peasant

speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance
authorises readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you
have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa, and have set its
obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sun. In choosing a
sense for your words you choose also an audience for them.
To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as it falls in the
sentence, according as its successive ties and associations are broken or
renewed. And here, seeing that the stupidest of all possible meanings is
very commonly the slang meaning, it will be well to treat briefly of
slang. For slang, in the looser acceptation of the term, is of two kinds,
differing, and indeed diametrically opposite, in origin and worth.
Sometimes it is the technical diction that has perforce been coined to
name the operations, incidents, and habits of some way of life that
society despises or deliberately elects to disregard. This sort of slang,
which often invents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is
vivid, accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to the world's
dictionaries and of compass to the world's range of thought. Society,
mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens in any habitual name,
seems to have become aware, by one of those wonderful processes of
chary instinct which serve the great, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu
of a brain, that to accept of the pickpocket his names for the mysteries
of his trade is to accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the
question of property. For this reason, and by no special masonic
precautions of his own, the pickpocket is allowed to keep the admirable
devices of his nomenclature for the familiar uses of himself and his
mates, until a Villon arrives to prove that this language, too, was
awaiting the advent of its bully and master. In the meantime, what
directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock
compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the
bench! It is the trite story,--romanticism forced to plead at the bar of
classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by Blackwood,
Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna Seward.
Accuser and accused alike recognise that a question of diction is part of
the issue between them; hence the picturesque confession of the culprit,
made in proud humility, that he "clicked a red 'un" must needs be
interpreted, to save the good faith of the court, into the vaguer and more

general speech of the classic convention. Those who dislike to have
their watches stolen find that the poorest language of common life will
serve their simple turn, without the rich technical additions of a
vocabulary that has grown around an art. They can abide no rendering
of the fact that does not harp incessantly on the disapproval of
watch-owners. They carry their point of morals at the cost of foregoing
all glitter and finish in the matter of expression.
This sort of slang, therefore, technical in origin, the natural
efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye,
is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind that goes
under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and
current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a
bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed
lout who