metimes we do it with a single word. When some
genius discovers that a "hat" is really only "a lid" placed on top of
a human being, straightway the word "lid" goes rippling over the
continent. Similarly a woman becomes a "skirt," and so on ad infinitum.

These words presently either disappear or else retain a permanent place,
being slang no longer. No doubt half our words, if not all of them,
were once slang. Even within our own memory we can see the whole
process carried through; "cinch" once sounded funny; it is now standard
American-English. But other slang is made up of descriptive phrases. At
the best, these slang phrases are--at least we think they are--extremely
funny. But they are funniest when newly coined, and it takes a master
hand to coin them well. For a supreme example of wild vagaries of
language used for humour, one might take O. Henry's "Gentle Grafter."
But here the imitation is as easy as it is tiresome. The invention of
pointless slang phrases without real suggestion or merit is one of our
most familiar forms of factory-made humour. Now the English people are
apt to turn away from the whole field of slang. In the first place it
puzzles them--they don't know whether each particular word or phrase
is a sort of idiom already known to Americans, or something (as with O.
Henry) never said before and to be analysed for its own sake. The result
is that with the English public the great mass of American slang writing
(genius apart) doesn't go. I have even found English people of undoubted
literary taste repelled from such a master as O. Henry (now read by
millions in England) because at first sight they get the impression that
it is "all American slang."

Another point in which American humour, or at least the form which it
takes, differs notably from British, is in the matter of story telling.
It was a great surprise to me the first time I went out to a dinner
party in London to find that my host did not open the dinner by telling
a funny story; that the guests did not then sit silent trying to "think
of another"; that some one did not presently break silence by saying, "I
heard a good one the other day,"--and so forth. And I realised that in
this respect English society is luckier than ours.

It is my candid opinion that no man ought to be allowed to tell a funny
story or anecdote without a license. We insist rightly enough that every
taxi-driver must have a license, and the same principle should apply
t