t suggests. And so it is that Slang words have a life as closely packed
with adventure as is the life of those who use them with the quickest
understanding. To ask what becomes of last year's Slang is as rash as to
speculate on the fate of last year's literature. Many specimens die in
the gutter, where they were born, after living a precarious life in the
mouths of men. Others are gathered into dictionaries, and survive to
become the sport of philologists. For the worst of their kind special
lexicons are designed, which, like prisons and workhouses, admit only
the disreputable, as though Victor Hugo's definition--"L'argot, c'est
le verbe devenu forcat"--were amply justified. The journals, too, which
take their material where they find it, give to many specimens a life as
long as their own. It is scarcely possible, for instance, to pick up an
American newspaper that does not turn the word _cinch_ to some strange
purpose. The form and origin of the word are worthy a better fate. It
passed from Spain into the Western States, and was the name given
to saddle-girths of leather or woven horse-hair. It suggests Mexican
horsemanship and the open prairie. The explanation given in the Century
Dictionary will make clear its meaning to the untravelled: "The two
ends of the tough cordage, which constitute the cinch, terminate in long
narrow strips of leather called _latigos_, which connect the cinches
with the saddle, and are run through an iron ring, called the _larigo_
ring, and then tied by a series of complicated turns and knots, known
only to the craft." In the West the word is still used in its natural
and dignified sense. For example: "At Giles's ranch, on the divide, the
party halted to cinch up." And then in the East it has become the victim
of extravagant metaphor. As a verb, it means to hold firm, to put a
screw on; as a noun, it means a grip or screw, an advantage fair or
unfair. In the hand of the sporting reporter it can achieve wonders.
"The bettor of whom the pool-room bookmaker stands in dread"--this
flower of speech is culled from the 'New York World'--"is the race-horse
owner, who has a cinch bottled up for a particular race, and drops into
the room an hour or two before the race begins." The idea of bottling a
cinch is enough to make a Californian shudder, and this confused image
helps to explain the difference between East and West.

Thus words wander farther and farther from their origin; and when at
last their