In the Paris of our day the slang
varies from hour to hour; every one seems able to follow it, and no one
knows who invents the constant new changes. The slang of the
boarding-house in Balzac's "Pere Goriot" is quite different from that of
the novels done by the Goncourt brothers; and, though I have not yet
mustered courage to finish one of M. Zola's outrages, I can see that the
vulgarisms which he has learned are not at all like any that have been
used in bygone days. The corruption of Paris seems to breed verbal
distortions rather freely, and the ordinary babble of the city workman
is as hard to any Englishman as are the colloquialisms of Burns to the
average Cockney.
In England our slang has undergone one transformation after another ever
since the time of Chaucer. Shakespeare certainly gives us plenty; then
we have the slang of the Great War, and then the unutterable horrors of
the Restoration--even the highly proper Mr. Joseph Addison does not
disdain to talk of an "old put," and his wags are given to "smoking"
strangers. The eighteenth century--the century of the gallows--gave us a
whole crop of queer terms which were first used in thieves' cellars, and
gradually filtered from the racecourse and the cockpit till they took
their place in the vulgar tongue.
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