scene-shifter’s “court-side,” and “garden-side,” the beadle’s “Gospel-side” and “Epistle-side,” are slang. There is the slang of the affected lady as well as of the précieuses . The Hotel Rambouillet nearly adjoins the Cour des Miracles. There is a slang of duchesses, witness this phrase contained in a love-letter from a very great lady and a very pretty woman of the Restoration: “You will find in this gossip a fultitude of reasons why I should libertize.” Diplomatic ciphers are slang; the pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome, grkztntgzyal for despatch, and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI for the Duc de Modena, speaks slang. The physicians of the Middle Ages who, for carrot, radish, and turnip, said “Opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalmus, dracatholicum, angelorum, postmegorum,” talked slang. The sugar-manufacturer who says: “Loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common, burnt,”—this honest manufacturer talks slang. A certain school of criticism twenty years ago, which used to say: “Half of the works of Shakespeare consists of plays upon words and puns,”—talked slang. The poet, and the artist who, with profound understanding, would designate M. de Montmorency as “a bourgeois,” if he were not a judge of verses and statues, speak slang. The classic Academician who calls flowers “Flora,” fruits, “Pomona,” the sea, “Neptune,” love, “fires,” beauty, “charms,” a horse, “a courser,” the white or tricolored cockade, “the rose of Bellona,” the three-cornered hat, “Mars’ triangle,”—that classical Academician talks slang. Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their slang. The tongue which is employed on board ship, that wonderful language of the sea, which is so complete and so picturesque, which was spoken by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperré, which mingles with the whistling of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the shock of the boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind, the gale, the cannon, is wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which is to the fierce slang of the thieves what the lion is to the jackal.
No doubt. But say what we will, this manner of understanding the word “slang” is an extension which everyone will not admit. For our part, we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed and