ul when
they do hit upon really significant linguistic peculiarities.
Their frequent failures lie in making the language of a particular
social type artificially stable. No one ever talks quite
as the conventional stage policeman, stage professor, and
stage Englishman talk.

These actual variations in the language, as it is used by
various groups who are brought up under the same standard
language, operate to prevent complete stabilization of language.
Such variations are remarkably influential, considering
the conservative influences upon language of the repeated
and continuous suggestion made by the printed page. The
language is, in the first place, being continually enriched
through increments of new words and modifications of old
ones, from the special vocabularies of trades, professions,
sciences, and sports. Through some accidental appositeness
to some contemporaneous situation, these may become generally
current. A recent and familiar example is the term
"camouflage," which from its technical sense of protective
coloration has become a universally understood name for
moral and intellectual pretense. The vocabulary of baseball
has by this time already given to the language words that
show promise of attaining eventual legitimacy. An increasingly
large source of enrichment of the native tongue comes
from the "spontaneous generation" of slang, which, starting
in the linguistic whimsicality of one individual, gets caught
up in conversation, and finds its ultimate way into the language.
Important instruments, certainly in the United
States, in spreading such neologisms are the humorous and
sporting pages of the newspapers, in which places they not
infrequently originate.[1] Whether a current slang expression
will persist, or perish (as do thousands initiated every year),
depends on accidents of contemporary circumstances. If the
expression happens to set off aptly a contemporary situation,
it may become very widespread until that situation, such as a
political campaign, is over. But it may, like the metaphor
of a poet, have some universal application. "Log-rolling,"
"graft," "bluff," have come into the language to stay.
Roosevelt's "pussy-foot," and "Ananias Club" are, perhaps,
remembered, but show less promise of permanency. "Movies"
has already ceased to be a neologism, its ready adoption
illustrating a point already mentioned, namely, that a variation
that facilitates speech (as "movies" does in comparison wi