Style | Page 8

in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor
for any incident in the beaten round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt,
can set his fancy rolling through the music-halls, and thence into the
street, secure of applause and a numerous sodden discipleship. Of the
same lazy stamp, albeit more amiable in effect, are the thought-saying
contrivances whereby one word is retained to do the work of many. For
the language of social intercourse ease is the first requisite; the average
talker, who would be hard put to it if he were called on to describe or to
define, must constantly be furnished with the materials of emphasis,
wherewith to drive home his likes and dislikes. Why should he alienate
himself from the sympathy of his fellows by affecting a singularity in
the expression of his emotions? What he craves is not accuracy, but
immediacy of expression, lest the tide of talk should flow past him,
leaving him engaged in a belated analysis. Thus the word of the day is
on all lips, and what was "vastly fine" last century is "awfully jolly"
now; the meaning is the same, the expression equally inappropriate.
Oaths have their brief periods of ascendency, and philology can boast
its fashion-plates. The tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip the fear of
solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common talkers, as they run hither
and thither pursuing, not self-expression, the prize of letters, but
unanimity and self-obliteration, the marks of good breeding. Like those
famous modern poets who are censured by the author of Paradise Lost,
the talkers of slang are "carried away by custom, to express many

things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have
exprest them." The poverty of their vocabulary makes appeal to the
brotherly sympathy of a partial and like-minded auditor, who can fill
out their paltry conventional sketches from his own experience of the
same events. Within the limits of a single school, or workshop, or
social circle, slang may serve; just as, between friends, silence may do
the work of talk. There are few families, or groups of familiars, that
have not some small coinage of this token-money, issued and accepted
by affection, passing current only within those narrow and privileged
boundaries. This wealth is of no avail to the travelling mind, save as a
memorial of home, nor is its material such "as, buried once, men want
dug up again." A few happy words and phrases, promoted, for some
accidental fitness, to the wider world of letters, are all that reach
posterity; the rest pass into oblivion with the other perishables of the
age.
A profusion of words used in an ephemeral slang sense is evidence,
then, that the writer addresses himself merely to the uneducated and
thoughtless of his own day; the revival of bygone meanings, on the
other hand, and an archaic turn given to language is the mark rather of
authors who are ambitious of a hearing from more than one age. The
accretions of time bring round a word many reputable meanings, of
which the oldest is like to be the deepest in grain. It is a counsel of
perfection--some will say, of vainglorious pedantry--but that shaft flies
furthest which is drawn to the head, and he who desires to be
understood in the twenty-fourth century will not be careless of the
meanings that his words inherit from the fourteenth. To know them is
of service, if only for the piquancy of avoiding them. But many times
they cannot wisely be avoided, and the auspices under which a word
began its career when first it was imported from the French or Latin
overshadow it and haunt it to the end.
Popular modern usage will often rob common words, like "nice,"
"quaint," or "silly," of all flavour of their origin, as if it were of no
moment to remember that these three words, at the outset of their
history, bore the older senses of "ignorant," "noted," and "blessed." It
may be granted that any attempt to return to these older senses,

regardless of later implications, is stark pedantry; but a delicate writer
will play shyly with the primitive significance in passing, approaching
it and circling it, taking it as a point of reference or departure. The early
faith of Christianity, its beautiful cult of childhood, and its appeal to
unlearned simplicity, have left their mark on the meaning of "silly"; the
history of the word is contained in that cry of St. Augustine, Indocti
surgunt et rapiunt coelum, or in the fervent sentence of the author of the
Imitation, Oportet fieri stultum. And if there is a later silliness,
altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words, while accepting this
last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox. So also he