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
Conventional modes of speech do not satisfy the adolescent, so that he
is often either reticent or slangy. Walt Whitman[12] says that slang
is "an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism and
to express itself illimitably, which in the highest walks produces
poets and poems"; and again, "Daring as it is to say so, in the growth
of language it is certain that the retrospect of slang from the start
would be the recalling from their nebulous condition of all that is
poetical in the stores of human utterance." Lowell[13] says, "There is
death in the dictionary, and where language is too strictly limited by
convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, and
we get a potted literature, Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees."
Lounsbury asserts that "slang is an effort on the part of the users of
language to say something more vividly, strongly, concisely than the
language existing permits it to be said. It is the source from which
the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed." Conradi
adds in substance that weak or vicious slang is too feeble to survive,
and what is vital enough to live fills a need. The final authority is
the people, and it is better to teach youth to discriminate between
good and bad slang rather than to forbid it entirely. Emerson calls it
language in the making, its crude, vital, material. It is often an
effective school of moral description, a palliative for profanity, and
expresses the natural craving for superlatives. Faults are hit off and
condemned with the curtness sententiousness of proverbs devised by
youth to sanctify itself and correct its own faults. The pedagogue
objects that it violates good form and established usage, but why
should the habits of hundreds of years ago control when they can not
satisfy the needs of youth, which requires a _lingua franca_ of its
own, often called "slanguage"? Most high school and college youth of
both sexes have two distinct styles, that of the classroom which is as
unnatural as the etiquette of a royal drawing-room reception or a
formal call, and the other, that of their own breezy, free, natural
life. Often these two have no relation to or effect upon each other,
and often the latter is at times put by with good resolves to speak as
purely and therefore as self-consciously as they knew, with petty
fines for every slang expression. But very few, and these generally
husky boys, boldly try to assert their own rude but vigorous
vernacular in the field of school requirements.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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