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 the most elegant English, at least a quite respectable word for newspaper use, is _maffick_. This word means to make a noisy show of joy over news of a victory. It dates from the relief of Mafeking by the British in 1900. When news of its relief came people at home seemed to go mad with joy. They rushed into the streets shouting and cheering, and there was a great deal of noise and confusion. It was noticed over and over again that there was no "mafficking" over successes in the Great War. People felt it too seriously to make a great noise about it.