Who coined it has hit on a
happy and a graphic and an illuminating expression; that at one
bound he rose triumphant above the limitations of the language and
tremendously enriched the working vocabulary of the man in the
street. Whereas an Englishman's idea of slinging slang is to scoop
up at random some inoffensive and well-meaning word that never did
him any harm and apply it in the place of some other word, to which
the first word is not related, even by marriage. And look how
they deliberately mispronounce proper names. Everybody knows about
Cholmondeley and St. John. But take the Scandinavian word fjord.
Why, I ask you, should the English insist on pronouncing it Ferguson?
At Oxford, the seat of learning, Magdalen is pronounced Maudlin,
probably in subtle tribute to the condition of the person who first
pronounced it so. General-admission day is not the day you enter,
but the day you leave. Full term means three-quarters of a term.
An ordinary degree is a degree obtained by a special examination.
An inspector of arts does not mean an inspector of arts, but a
student; and from this point they go right ahead, getting worse
all the time. The droll creature who compiled the Oxford glossary
was a true Englishman.
When an Englishman undertakes to wrestle with American slang he
makes a fearful hash of it. In an English magazine I read a
short story, written by an Englishman who is regarded by a good
many persons, competent to judge, as being the cleverest writer
of English alive today. The story was beautifully done from the
standpoint of composition; it bristled with flashing metaphors and
whimsical phrasing. The scene of the yarn was supposed to be
Chicago and naturally the principal figure in it was a millionaire.
In one place the author has this person saying, "I reckon you'll
feel pretty mean," and in another place, "I reckon I'm not a man
with no pull."
Another character in the story says, "I know you don't cotton
to the march of science in these matters," and speaks of something
that is unusual as being "a rum affair." A walled state prison,
presumably in Illinois, is referred to as a "convict camp"; and
its warden is called a "governor" and an assistant keeper is called
a "warder"; while a Chicago daily paper is quoted as saying that
"larrikins" directed the attention of a policeman to a person who
was doing thus and so.
The writer describes a "mysterious mere" known as Pilgrim's Pond,
"in which they say" - a prison official is supposed to be talking
now - "our fathers made witches walk until they sank." Descendants
of the original Puritans who went from Plymouth Rock, in the summer
of 1621, and founded Chicago, will recall this pond distinctly.
