are already words to describe the things
which the slang words describe. It may seem curious, then, that people
should trouble to find new words. The reason they do so is often that
they want to be different from other people, and sometimes because the
slang word is much more expressive than the ordinary word.

This is one reason that the slang of a small number of people spreads
and becomes general. Sometimes the slang word is so much better in
this way than the old word that it becomes more generally used than
it, and finds its way into the ordinary dictionaries. When this
happens it is no longer slang.

But, as a rule, slang is ugly or meaningless, and it is very often
vulgar. However common its use may become, the best judges will not
use such expressions, and they remain mere slang.

A writer on the subject of slang has given us two good examples of
meaningless and expressive slang. The people who first called
marmalade "swish" could have no reason for inventing the new name
except to seem odd and different from other people. _Swish_ is
certainly not a more expressive or descriptive word than _marmalade_.
The one means nothing, while the other has an interesting history
coming to us through the French from two old Greek words meaning
"apple" and "honey."

The expressive word which this writer quotes is _swag_, a slang word
for "stolen goods." There is no doubt that _swag_ is a much more
expressive word than any of the ordinary words used to describe the
same thing. One gets a much more vivid picture from the sentence, "The
thieves got off with the _swag_," than he would had the word _prize_
or even _plunder_ or _booty_ been used. Yet there is no sign that the
word _swag_ will become good English. Expressive as it is, there is a
vulgar flavour about it which would make people who are at all
fastidious in their language very unwilling to use it.

Yet many words and phrases which must have seemed equally vulgar when
first used have come to be accepted as good English. And in fact much
of our language, and especially metaphorical words and phrases, were
once slang. It will be interesting to examine some examples of old
slang which have now become good English.

One common form of slang is the use of expressions connected with
sport as metaphors in speaking of other things. Thus it is slang to
say that we were "in at the death" when we mean that we stayed to the
end of a meeting or performance. This is, of cours