Interesting, for comparative purposes, are the secret languages and jargons of adults. As Paul Sartori (528) has recently shown, the use of special or secret languages by various individuals and classes in the communities is widespread both in myth and reality. We find peculiar dialects spoken by, or used in addressing, deities and evil spirits; giants, monsters; dwarfs, elves, fairies; ghosts, spirits; witches, wizards, "medicine men"; animals, birds, trees, inanimate objects. We meet also with special dialects of secret societies (both of men and of women); sacerdotal and priestly tongues; special dialects of princes, nobles, courts; women's languages, etc.; besides a multitude of jargons, dialects, languages of trades and professions, of peasants, shepherds, soldiers, merchants, hunters, and the divers slangs and jargons of the vagabonds, tramps, thieves, and other outcast or criminal classes. Far-reaching indeed is the field opened by the consideration of but a single aspect of child-speech, that doll-language which Joaquin Miller so aptly notes:-- "Yet she carried a doll, as she toddled alone, And she talked to that doll in a tongue her own." _Diminutives._ Both the golden age of childhood and the golden age of love exercise a remarkable influence upon language. Mantegazza, discussing "the desire to merge oneself into another, to abase oneself, to aggrandize the beloved," etc., observes: "We see it in the use of diminutives which lovers and sometimes friends use towards each other, and which mothers use to their children; we lessen ourselves thus in a delicate and generous manner in order that we may be embraced and absorbed in the circle of the creature we love. Nothing is more easily possessed than a small object, and before the one we love we would change ourselves into a bird, a canary--into any minute thing that we might be held utterly in the hands, that we might feel ourselves pressed on all sides by the warm and loving fingers. There is also another secret reason for the use of diminutives. Little creatures are loved tenderly, and tenderness is the supreme sign of every great force which is dissolved and consumes itself. After the wild, passionate, impetuous embrace there is always the tender note, and then diminutives, whether they belong to expression or to language, always play a great part" (499. 137). The fondness of boys for calling each other by the diminutives of their surnames belongs here.