an loves best as his joke the narration of something
that actually did happen and that depends, of course; for its point on
its reality.

There are plenty of minor differences, too, in point of mere form, and
very naturally each community finds the particular form used by the
others less pleasing than its own. In fact, for this very reason each
people is apt to think its own humour the best.

Thus, on our side of the Atlantic, to cite our own faults first, we
still cling to the supposed humour of bad spelling. We have, indeed,
told ourselves a thousand times over that bad spelling is not funny, but
is very tiresome. Yet it is no sooner laid aside and buried than it gets
resurrected. I suppose the real reason is that it is funny, at least
to our eyes. When Bill Nye spells wife with "yph" we can't help being
amused. Now Bill Nye's bad spelling had absolutely no point to it except
its oddity. At times it was extremely funny, but as a mode it led easily
to widespread and pointless imitation. It was the kind of thing--like
poetry--that anybody can do badly. It was most deservedly abandoned with
execration. No American editor would print it to-day. But witness the
new and excellent effect produced with bad spelling by Mr. Ring W.
Lardner. Here, however, the case is altered; it is not the falseness of
Mr. Lardner's spelling that is the amusing feature of it, but the truth
of it. When he writes, "dear friend, Al, I would of rote sooner," etc.,
he is truer to actual sound and intonation than the lexicon. The mode
is excellent. But the imitations will soon debase it into such bad coin
that it will fail to pass current. In England, however, the humour of
bad spelling does not and has never, I believe, flourished. Bad spelling
is only used in England as an attempt to reproduce phonetically a
dialect; it is not intended that the spelling itself should be thought
funny, but the dialect that it represents. But the effect, on the whole,
is tiresome. A little dose of the humour of Lancashire or Somerset or
Yorkshire pronunciation may be all right, but a whole page of it looks
like the gibbering of chimpanzees set down on paper.

In America also we run perpetually to the (supposed) humour of slang, a
form not used in England. If we were to analyse what we mean by slang I
think it would be found to consist of the introduction of new metaphors
or new forms of language of a metaphorical character, strained almost
to the breaking point. So