and condemned with the curtness sententiousness of proverbs devised by youth
to sanctify itself and correct its own faults. The pedagogue objects that it violates
good form and established usage, but why should the habits of hundreds of years
ago control when they can not satisfy the needs of youth, which requires a lingua
franca of its own, often called "slanguage"? Most high school and college youth
of both sexes have two distinct styles, that of the classroom which is as unnatural
as the etiquette of a royal drawing-room reception or a formal call, and the other,
that of their own breezy, free, natural life. Often these two have no relation to or
effect upon each other, and often the latter is at times put by with good resolves
to speak as purely and therefore as self-consciously as they knew, with petty
fines for every slang expression. But very few, and these generally husky boys,
boldly try to assert their own rude but vigorous vernacular in the field of school
requirements.
These simple studies in this vast field demonstrate little or nothing, but they
suggest very much. Slang commonly expresses a moral judgment and falls into
ethical categories. It usually concerns ideas, sentiment, and will, has a psychic
content, and is never, like the language of the school, a mere picture of objects of
sense or a description of acts. To restate it in correct English would be a course
in ethics, courtesy, taste, logical predication and opposition, honesty, self-
possession, modesty, and just the ideal and non-presentative mental content that
youth most needs, and which the sensuous presentation methods of teaching
have neglected. Those who see in speech nothing but form condemn it because it
is vulgar. Youth has been left to meet these high needs alone, and the prevalence
of these crude forms is an indictment of the delinquency of pedagogues in not
teaching their pupils to develop and use their intellect properly. Their pith and
meatiness are a standing illustration of the need of condensation for intellectual
objects that later growth analyzes. These expressions also illustrate the law that
the higher and larger the spiritual content, the grosser must be the illustration in
which it is first couched. Further studies now in progress will, I believe, make
this still clearer.
Again, we see in the above, outcrops of the strong pubescent instinct to enlarge
the vocabulary in two ways. One is to affect foreign equivalents. This at first
suggests an appetency for another language like the dog-Latin gibberish of
children. It is one of the motives that prompts many to study Latin or French, but
it has little depth, for it turns out, on closer study, to be only the affectation of
superiority and the love of mystifying others. The other is a very different