pression which will
win attention and impress the memory. A strong expletive shocks an
opponent, or it is an instinctive reaction on a situation which
threatens the well-being of the speaker. It is a vent to emotion which
gives relief from it when other relief is not possible. This last is one
of the chief useful reasons for expletives. However, even then they are
a vicious habit, for stronger and stronger expressions are required to
win the same subjective effects. Old expressions lose force. Slang is
the new coinage. The mintage is often graphic and droll; it is also
often stupid and vulgar. A selection goes on. Some of it is rejected and
some enters into the language. Expletives also go out of fashion. The
strain for effect can be satisfied only by constantly greater and
greater excess. It becomes a bad personal habit to use grotesque and
extravagant expressions. Slang and expletives destroy the power of clear
and cogent expression in speech or writing; and they must affect powers
of thinking. Although slang is a new coinage which reinvigorates the
language, the fashion of slang and expletives must be rated, like the
fashion of using tobacco and alcohol, as at best a form of play, a habit
and custom which springs from no need and conduces to no interest. The
acts result in an idle satisfaction of the doer, and the good or ill
effects all fall within his own organism. The prevalence of such
fashions in a society becomes a fact of its mores, for there will be
rational effects on interests. The selective effect of them is in the
resistance to the fashions or subjection to them. They are only to a
limited extent enforced by social sanctions. There is personal liberty
in regard to them. Resistance depends on independent judgment and
self-control, and produces independence and self-control; that is, it
affects character. Groups are differentiated inside the society of those
who resist and those who do not, and the effect on the mores (character
of the group) results. The selective effects appear in the competition
of life between the two groups.

+198. Poses, fads, and cant.+ When fashion seizes upon an idea or usage
and elevates it to a feature of a society at a period, it is, as was
said above, affected by those who cannot attain to the real type and who
exaggerate its external forms. The humanism of the Renaissance produced
an affectation of learning, dilettante interest in collecting
manuscripts, and zeal for style whi