The readers of more than fifty millions
of people in the New World not only owe to him some of their most
agreeable and harmless and healthy hours, but he has enter'd into
the formative influences of character here, not only in the Atlantic
cities, but inland and far West, out in Missouri, in Kansas, and away
in Oregon, in farmer's house and miner's cabin.
Best thanks, anyhow, to Alfred Tennyson--thanks and appreciation in
America's name.
SLANG IN AMERICA
View'd freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of
every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and
compacted composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for
Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies.
It involves so much; is indeed a sort of universal absorber, combiner,
and conqueror. The scope of its etymologies is the scope not only of
man and civilization, but the history of Nature in all departments,
and of the organic Universe, brought up to date; for all are
comprehended in words, and their backgrounds. This is when words
become vitaliz'd, and stand for things, as they unerringly and soon
come to do, in the mind that enters on their study with fitting
spirit, grasp, and appreciation.
Slang, profoundly consider'd, is the lawless germinal element, below
all words and sentences, and behind all poetry, and proves a certain
perennial rankness and protestantism in speech. As the United States
inherit by far their most precious possession--the language they talk
and write--from the Old World, under and out of its feudal institutes,
I will allow myself to borrow a simile even of those forms farthest
removed from American Democracy.
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