freshened the blood of conventional
style that in the decadence of the End of the Century had grown dilute.
This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its
rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a
verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is
strong enough to assault the very syntax of our Anglo-Saxon tongue.[*]

[*] Note, for instance, the potential mood used indicatively in the
current colloquial, "Wouldn't that jar you!"

Slang, the illegitimate sister of Poetry, makes with her a common cause
against the utilitarian economy of Prose. They both stand for lavish
luxuriance in trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of
thought. It is their boast to make two words bloom where one grew
before. Both garb themselves in Metaphor, and the only complaint of the
captious can be that whereas Poetry follows the accepted style, Slang
dresses her thought to suit herself in fantastic and bizarre caprices,
that her whims are unstable and too often in bad taste.

But this odium given to Slang by superficial minds is undeserved. In
other days, before the language was crystallized into the idiom and
verbiage of the doctrinaire, prose, too, was untrammeled. Indeed, a
cursory glance at the Elizabethan poets discloses a kinship with the
rebellious fancies of our modern colloquial talk. Mr. Irwin's sonnets
may be taken as an indication of this revolt, and how nearly they
approach the incisive phrases of the seventeenth century may easily be
shown in a few exemplars. For instance, in Sonnet XX, "You're the real
tan bark!" we have a close parallel in Johnson's Volpone, or The Fox:

"Fellows of outside and mere bark!"

And this instance is an equally good illustration also of that curious
process which, in the English language, has in time created for a single
word ("cleave," for instance) two exactly opposite meanings. A line from
John Webster's Appius and Virginia might be cited as showing how near
his diction approached modern slang:

"My most neat and cunning orator, whose tongue is quicksilver;"

and, for an analogy similar, though elaborate, compare lines 5-8 in
Sonnet XI. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster,

"A pernicious petticoat prince"

is as close to "Mame's dress-suit belle" of No. VII as modern costume
allows, and

"No, you scarab!"

from Ben Jonson's Alchemist gives a curious clue to the derivation of
the popular ter