Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 126, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 May 1919 — HOW LANGUAGE IS ENRICHED [ARTICLE]

HOW LANGUAGE IS ENRICHED

New Words and Phrases Most Frequently Hsve Their Origin In the Patter of Thieve*. It is necessary that the language of a nation should be refreshed and strengthened now and then by the introduction of new words and phrases, and, as befits democracy, these spring from the soil; not one of them de--scends upon us from the Olympian heights, observes the New York Herald. Neither scientific nor scholastic bodies ever enrich the. common tongue with expressions so apt and full of meaning that they gain immediate and enduring vogue. The slang of the undergraduate collegian is pitifully inept and meager. For anything that can give a new zest to the vulgate we must look to the stage, the gambling house and even to the opium den and thieves’ resort. Returning soldiers will certainly bring with them much of the argot of field and trench of which “cooties” is a sample. The word “joint”-as applied to Iniquitous and other resorts comes from the joint of bamboo from which an opium pipe is made. “Dope ’ was originally the slang term for opium—hence "dope” and “dopy.” Innumerable are the verbal products of the gambling house. Among the commonest of them are "four flushing,” “keeping tab,” "standing pat” and “down to cases.” To “give the office” or “office” some one is a very old bit of London thieves’ slang. The cause of all this is quite apparent to the thinking mind. Persons of education and cultivation have a vocabulary of their own sufficiently large and varied to enable them to expN>ss themselves without going 4 beyond its limits. Those who are lacking in education sometimes coin words in an emergency that prove so expressive that they acquire general currency.