s often become slang when adopted into
another. A slang word much used in America and sometimes in England
(for American expressions are constantly finding their way into the
English language) is _vamoose_, which means "depart." _Vamoose_ comes
from a quite ordinary Mexican word, _vamos_, which is Spanish for "let
us go."

It is very interesting to find that many of our most respectable words
borrowed from Latin have a slang origin. Sometimes these words were
slang in Latin itself; sometimes they were used as slang only after
they passed into English. The French word _tete_, which means "head,"
comes from the Latin _testa_, "a pot." (We have seen that this is the
word from which we get our word _test_.) Some Romans, instead of using
_caput_, the real Latin word for "head," would sometimes in slang
fashion speak of some one's _testa_, or "pot," and from this slang
word the French got their regular word for head.

The word _insult_ comes from the Latin _insultarc_, which meant at
first "to spring or leap at," and afterwards came to have the same
meaning as it has with us. The persons who first used this expression
in the second sense were really using slang, picturing a person who
said something unpleasant to them as "jumping at them."

We have the same kind of slang in the expression "to jump down one's
throat," when we mean "to complain violently of some one's behaviour."
The word _effrontery_, which comes to us from the French
_effronterie_, is really the same expression as the vulgar terms
_face_ and _cheek_, meaning "impudence." For the word comes from the
Latin _frons_, "the forehead."

An example of a word which was quite good English, and then came to be
used as slang in a special sense, and then in this same special sense
became good English again, is _grit_. The word used to mean in English
merely "sand" or "gravel," and it came to mean especially the texture
or grain of stones used for grinding. Then in American slang it came
to be used to mean all that we mean now when we say a person has
"grit"--namely, courage, and strength, and firmness. This use of the
word seemed so good that it rapidly became good English; but the
American slang-makers soon found another word to replace it, and now
talk of people having "sand," which is not by any means so expressive,
and will probably never pass out of the realm of slang.

An example of a word which was at first used as slang not many years
ago, and is now, if not