Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
The reasons given are, in order of frequency, that slang was more
emphatic, more exact, more concise, convenient, sounded pretty,
relieved formality, was natural, manly, appropriate, etc. Only a very
few thought it was vulgar, limited the vocabulary, led to or was a
substitute for swearing, destroyed exactness, etc. This writer
attempts a provisional classification of slang expressions under the
suggestive heads of rebukes to pride, boasting and loquacity,
hypocrisy, quaint and emphatic negatives, exaggerations, exclamations,
mild oaths, attending to one's own business and not meddling or
interfering, names for money, absurdity, neurotic effects of surprise
or shock, honesty and lying, getting confused, fine appearance and
dress, words for intoxication which Partridge has collected,[10]for
anger collated by Chamberlain,[11] crudeness or innocent naïveté, love
and sentimentality, etc. Slang is also rich in describing conflicts of
all kinds, praising courage, censuring inquisitiveness, and as a
school of moral discipline, but he finds, however, a very large number
unclassified; and while he maintains throughout a distinction between
that used by boys and by girls, sex differences are not very marked.
The great majority of terms are mentioned but once, and a few under
nearly all of the above heads have great numerical precedence. A
somewhat striking fact is the manifold variations of a pet typical
form. Twenty-three shock expletives, e.g., are, "Wouldn't that ----
you?" the blank being filled by jar, choke, cook, rattle, scorch, get,
start, etc., or instead of _you_ adjectives are devised. Feeling is so
intense and massive, and psychic processes are so rapid, forcible, and
undeveloped that the pithiness of some of those expressions makes them
brilliant and creative works of genius, and after securing an
apprenticeship are sure of adoption. Their very lawlessness helps to
keep speech from rigidity and desiccation, and they hit off nearly
every essential phrase of adolescent life and experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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