nerally not worth
tracing. Others are markedly metaphorical fittings of words with new
meanings, and often highly expressive meanings. They are efforts of
fancy not conveyed in metre, nor even in prose, but condensed into a
single word or phrase. They thus become portable enough to run like
lightning from tongue to tongue and pen to pen over a continent. But,
like other electric flashes, they are not usually of long duration. If
quickly started, they are as quickly forgotten. Each generation or
decade or year manufactures its own supply of slang words, and seldom
bequeaths any of them as a permanent inheritance. Delineators of rude or
low life, like the litterateurs of the Pacific coast school, Dickens and
Thackeray, embed in their writings the slang of their day; but it stays
there, recommended though it may be by the brilliancy of its setting,
and rarely passes into currency outside of their pages. Its flavor is
usually too local and fugitive for that.

As slang blends in one direction with genuine poetry, in another it
sinks into the base jargon invented by evil-doers for the disguise of
their intercourse and concealment of their purposes. Of the latter
description are the dialects of the prize-ring and the fraternity of
thieves. These are rich and copious, and often ingenious, like the other
devices of their originators. How far the gypsy language may be
included with them it is impossible to say; but it has been largely
borrowed from by them, thanks either to community of objects, and
consequent sympathy of feelings, or to its obscurity and shapelessness,
and the utter ignorance of it among the intelligent and plunderable
classes.

These classes have a slang of their own too; and some of it gets
established in the language. Broadly speaking, all foreign words which
are adopted from affectation, and not from the growing necessities of
science and thought, may be ranked as slang. That they should
occasionally effect a lodgment it is not at all indispensable that they
should impart a new idea. Very often they merely elbow out an old member
of the vernacular conveying precisely the same meaning. It would be easy
to cite such cases, and to point to naturalized foreigners, now
unnoticed in every-day intercourse, but at their first appearance
conspicuous enough in fashionable slang. Scores of them have been
introduced to us by the milliner and the tailor. Vouched for by such
august authority, they are of course elegant.