'Bored,' 'cut up,'
'jolly,' 'rotten,' and so on, are like the words of some tribe of
savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them. If a man of fashion
wished to protest against some solecism in another man of fashion, his
utterance would be a mere string of set phrases, as lifeless as a string
of dead fish. But an omnibus conductor (being filled with the Muse)
would burst out into a solid literary effort: 'You're a gen'leman,
aren't yer ... yer boots is a lot brighter than yer 'ed...there's
precious little of yer, and that's clothes...that's right, put yer cigar
in yer mouth 'cos I can't see yer be'ind it...take it out again, do yer!
you're young for smokin', but I've sent for yer mother.... Goin'? oh,
don't run away: I won't 'arm yer. I've got a good 'art, I 'ave.... "Down
with croolty to animals," I say,' and so on. It is evident that this
mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and
almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote
metaphors as a coster puts into a curse; his speech is one long
allegory, like Spenser's 'Faerie Queen.'
I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic
allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang.
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