Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860

With this aristocracy of speech we are all familiar. We do not mean with the speech of our aristocracy, which is quite another thing, but that which is held appropriate for "great occasions," for public parade, and for pen, ink, and types. It is cherished where all aristocracies flourish best,–in the "rural districts." There is a style and a class of words and phrases belonging to country newspapers, and to the city weeklies which have the largest bucolic circulation, which you detect in the Congressional eloquence of the honorable member for the Fifteenth District, Mass., and in the Common-School Reports of Boston Corner,–a style and words that remind us of the country gentry whose titles date back to the Plantagenets. They look so strangely beside the brisk, dapper curtnesses in which metropolitan journals transact their daily squabbles! We never write one of them out without an involuntary addition of quotation-marks, as a New-Yorker puts to his introduction of his verdant cousin the supplementary, "From the Jerseys." Their etymological Herald's Office is kept by schoolmasters, and especially schoolma'ams, or, in the true heraldic tongue, "Preceptresses of Educational Seminaries." You may find them in Mr. Hobbs, Jr.'s, celebrated tale of "The Bun-Baker of Cos-Cob," or in Bowline's thrilling novelette of "Beauty and Booty, or The Black Buccaneer of the Bermudas." They glitter in the train of "Napoleon and his Marshals," and look down upon us from the heights of "The Sacred Mountains."

Occasionally you will find them degraded from their high estate and fallen among the riff-raff of slang. They become "seedy" words, stripped of their old meaning, mere chevaliers d'industrie , yet with something of the air noble about them which distinguishes them from the born "cad." The word "convey" once suffered such eclipse, (we are glad to say it has come up again,) and consorted, unless Falstaff be mistaken, with such low blackguards as "nim" and "cog" and "prig" and similar "flash" terms.

But we do not propose to linger among the "upper-ten" of the dictionaries. The wont of such is to follow the law of hereditary aristocracies: the old blood gets thin, there is no sparkle to the sangre azul , the language dies out in poverty. The strong, new, popular word forces its way up, is heard at the bar, gets quoted in the pulpit, slips into the outer ring of good society. King Irving or King Emerson lays his pen across its shoulder and it rises up ennobled, till finally it is accepted of the "Atlantic Monthly," and its court-presentation is complete.

We have thus indicated the nature of the great contest in language between the conventional and the idiomatic. Idioms are just what their name implies. They are the commonalty of language,–private, proletarian words, who do the work, " dum alteri tulerunt honores ." They come to us from all handiworks and callings, where you will always find them at their posts. Sharp, energetic, incisive, they do the hard labor of speech,–that of carrying heavy loads of thought and shaping new ideas.

We think them vulgar at first, and savoring of the shop; but they are useful and handy, and we cannot do without them. They rivet, they forge, they coin, they "fire up," "brake up," "switch off," "prospect," "shin" for us when we are "short," "post up" our books, and finally ourselves, "strike a lead," "follow a trail," "stand up to the rack," "dicker," "swap," and "peddle." They are "whole teams" beside the "one-horse" vapidities which fail to bear our burdens. The Norman cannot keep down the Saxon. The Saxon finds his Wat Tyler or Jack Cade. Now "Mose" brings his Bowery Boys into our parlor, or Cromwell Judd recruits his Ironsides from the hamlets of the Kennebec.

We declare for the prolétaires. We vote the working-words ticket. We have to plead the cause of American idioms. Some of them have, as we said, good blood in them and can trace their lineage and standing to the English Bible and Book of Common Prayer; others are "new men," born under hedge-rows and left as foundlings at furnace-doors. And before we go farther, we have a brief story to tell in illustration of the two tongues.

A case of assault and battery was tried in a Western court. The plaintiff's counsel informed the jury in his opening, that he was "prepared to prove that the defendant, a steamboat-captain, menaced his client, an English traveller, and put him in bodily fear, commanding him to vacate the avenue of the steamboat with his baggage, or he would precipitate him into the river." The evidence showed that the captain called out,–"Stranger, ef you don't tote your plunder off that gang-plank, I'll spill you in the drink."

We submit that for terseness and vigor the practitioner at the bar of the Ohio had the better of the learned counsel who appeared at the bar of justice, albeit his client was in a Cockney mystification at the address.

The illustration will serve our turn. It points to a class of phrases which are indigenous to various localities of the land, in which the native thought finds appropriate, bold, and picturesque utterance. And these in time become incorporate into the universal tongue. Of them is the large family of political phrases. These are coined in moments of intense excitement, struck out at white heat, or, to follow our leading metaphor, like the speakers who use them, come upon the stump in their shirt-sleeves. Every campaign gives us a new horde. Some die out at once; others felicitously tickle the public ear and ring far and wide. They "speak for Buncombe," are Barn-Burners, Old Hunkers, Hard Shells, Soft Shells, Log-Rollers, Pipe-Layers, Woolly Heads, Silver Grays, Locofocos, Fire-Eaters, Adamantines, Free Soilers, Freedom Shriekers, Border Ruffians. They spring from a bon-mot or a retort. The log-cabin and hard-cider watchwords were born of a taunt, like the "Gueux" of the Netherlands. The once famous phrase, Gerrymandering, some of our readers may remember. Governor Elbridge Gerry contrived, by a curious arrangement of districts in Massachusetts, to transfer the balance of power to his own party. One of his opponents, poring over the map of the Commonwealth, was struck by the odd look of the geographical lines which thus were drawn, curving in and out among the towns and counties. "It looks," said he, "like a Salamander." "Looks like a Gerry -mander!" ejaculated another; and the term stuck long and closely.

Now and then you have the aristocratic and democratic sides of an idea in use at the same time. Those who style themselves "Gentlemen of the Press" are known to the rest of mankind as "Dead Heads,"–being, for paying purposes, literally, capita mortua .

So, too, our colleges are provided, over and above the various dead languages of their classic curriculum, with the two tongues. The one serves the young gentlemen, especially in their Sophomoric maturity, with appropriate expressions for their literary exercises and public flights. The other is for their common talk, tells who "flunked" and was "deaded," who "fished" with the tutor, who "cut" prayers, and who was "digging" at home. Each college, from imperial Harvard and lordly Yale to the freshest Western "Institution," whose three professors fondly cultivate the same number of aspiring Alumni, has its particular dialect with its quadrennial changes. The just budded Freshmen of the class of '64 could hardly without help decipher "The Rebelliad," which in the Consulship of Plancus Kirkland was the epic of the day. The good old gentlemen who come up to eat Commencement dinners and to sing with quavery voices the annual psalm thereafter, are bewildered in the mazes of the college-speech of their grandsons. Whence come these phrases few can tell. Like witty Dr. S–'s "quotation," which never was anything else, they started in life as sayings, springing full-grown, like Pallas Athene, from the laboring brain of some Olympic Sophister. Here in the quiet of our study in the country, we wonder if the boys continue as in our day to "create a shout," instead of "making a call," upon their lady acquaintances,–if they still use "ponies,"–if they "group," and get, as we did, "parietals" and "publics" for the same.