"
Daring as it is to say so, in the growth of Language it is certain
that the retrospect of slang from the start would be the recalling
from their nebulous conditions of all that is poetical in the stores
of human utterance. Moreover, the honest delving, as of late years, by
the German and British workers in comparative philology, has pierc'd
and dispers'd many of the falsest bubbles of centuries; and will
disperse many more. It was long recorded that in Scandinavian
mythology the heroes in the Norse Paradise drank out of the skulls of
their slain enemies. Later investigation proves the word taken for
skulls to mean _horns_ of beasts slain in the hunt. And what reader
had not been exercis'd over the traces of that feudal custom, by which
_seigneurs_ warm'd their feet in the bowels of serfs, the abdomen
being open'd for the purpose? It now is made to appear that the serf
was only required to submit his unharm'd abdomen as a foot cushion
while his lord supp' d, and was required to chafe the legs of the
seigneur with his hands.
It is curiously in embryons and childhood, and among the illiterate,
we always find the groundwork and start, of this great science, and
its noblest products. What a relief most people have in speaking of
a man not by his true and formal name, with a "Mister" to it, but by
some odd or homely appellative. The propensity to approach a meaning
not directly and squarely, but by circuitous styles of expression,
seems indeed a born quality of the common people everywhere, evidenced
by nick-names, and the inveterate determination of the masses to
bestow sub-titles, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes very apt.
Pages:
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694