one's own business and not meddling or interfering, names for money, absurdity,
neurotic effects of surprise or shock, honesty and lying, getting confused, fine
appearance and dress, words for intoxication which Partridge has collected,
[10]for anger collated by Chamberlain,[11] crudeness or innocent naïveté, love
and sentimentality, etc. Slang is also rich in describing conflicts of all kinds,
praising courage, censuring inquisitiveness, and as a school of moral discipline,
but he finds, however, a very large number unclassified; and while he maintains
throughout a distinction between that used by boys and by girls, sex differences
are not very marked. The great majority of terms are mentioned but once, and a
few under nearly all of the above heads have great numerical precedence. A
somewhat striking fact is the manifold variations of a pet typical form. Twenty-
three shock expletives, e.g., are, "Wouldn't that —— you?" the blank being
filled by jar, choke, cook, rattle, scorch, get, start, etc., or instead of you
adjectives are devised. Feeling is so intense and massive, and psychic processes
are so rapid, forcible, and undeveloped that the pithiness of some of those
expressions makes them brilliant and creative works of genius, and after
securing an apprenticeship are sure of adoption. Their very lawlessness helps to
keep speech from rigidity and desiccation, and they hit off nearly every essential
phrase of adolescent life and experience.
Conventional modes of speech do not satisfy the adolescent, so that he is often
either reticent or slangy. Walt Whitman[12] says that slang is "an attempt of
common humanity to escape from bald literalism and to express itself
illimitably, which in the highest walks produces poets and poems"; and again,
"Daring as it is to say so, in the growth of language it is certain that the
retrospect of slang from the start would be the recalling from their nebulous
condition of all that is poetical in the stores of human utterance." Lowell[13]
says, "There is death in the dictionary, and where language is too strictly limited
by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, and we get a
potted literature, Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees." Lounsbury asserts that
"slang is an effort on the part of the users of language to say something more
vividly, strongly, concisely than the language existing permits it to be said. It is
the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed."
Conradi adds in substance that weak or vicious slang is too feeble to survive, and
what is vital enough to live fills a need. The final authority is the people, and it is
better to teach youth to discriminate between good and bad slang rather than to
forbid it entirely. Emerson calls it language in the making, its crude, vital,
material. It is often an effective school of moral description, a palliative for
profanity, and expresses the natural craving for superlatives. Faults are hit off