Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1890-08-09
WORDS AND SLANG.
Curtailment of Our Vocabulary Narrow
ing IDEAS

ing Ideas.
From the Philadelphia Bulletinl
A writer who has made the use of
words thoughtful study estimates that
the ordinary American employs from 5000
to 1000 English words in ordinary speech
When it is considered how numerous are
the things in the house, store, in the
street, in church and all about us, all of
which have names which we make nse of
continuously, and what perpetual motion
we see and speak of in the form of verbs,
and the propositions and conjunctions we
have to use to make the things properly
related, and the qualities we have to de-
scribe with adjectives and adverbs, and
other parts of speech necessary to COM
plete sentences, we behold how limited is
the general acquaintanceship with the
language of which the root-words alone, as
compiled by Webster, number 114,0OO,
irrespective of proper nouns or names of
persons.
And it is one of the noticeable features
of fancy, habit, fad" or fashion of our
civilization, existing as well in the fairly
educated as among the illiterate and igno-
rant, that the popular spoken vocabulary
is growing continually less on account of
an increasing tendency to generalize quail
tiles and characteristics in pat or pet
words which are among stylish" men and
women considered en- reqLe, and among
the no less ambitious, but not so well edu-
Gated classes, deemed evidence of proper
familiarity with the daily march of events
and the customs of speech, the continual
use and reiteration of slangy words that
are "all the &C" and constitute the badge
of proper rapid tendencies.
With the smart young misses everything
that is beautiful, sweet, delicious, melodi-
Gus, Respondent, soft and winning, what
ever pleases to excess, the eyes, ears, taste,
touch or smell is ''lovely." Whatever is
ugly, distorted, Earring, unsymmetrical,
uncouth, discordant and generally unpleas-
ant to the eye, ear, taste, touch or smell is
"horrid."
The man about town, the swell of the
parlor, the clerk in the store, the alert
man of business, the critical attendant on
the art gallery and the habitual theater-
goer characterize equally the slow, the
deliberate, the careful, the plainly dressed,
the pious, the plain-spoken, the steady
going, the painstaking individual as
ITeSH, Willie lHe qulck-Wllteu, tne alert
the tricky, the volatile, the gaseous, the
oratorical, the romancer and the jocose are
alike spoken of-in sort of deprecatory
sarcasm-as funny" So also man who
has audacity, as well as one who is self
assertive and strenuous for his rights, is
equally said to be possessed of gall" And
thus isolated words used frequently to ex-
press the widest range of qualities, habits
or characteristics have come into vogue as
necessary essentials or credentials to adj
mission into the vanguard of progressive
Americanism, to the curtailment of the
talking vocabulary and the narrowing of
ideas.
The difference in the meaning of words
is thus lost or becomes obsolete, and with
the disappearance of the word to express
exactly the quality or characteristic in
tended there follows an obtuseness of dis
cernment, a confusion of thought and an
obvious paucity and shrinkage of ideas.
independently, therefore, of the bad taste
of using slang words and expressions, they
are making our people poor intellectually
and less able colloquially to hold their
own among the other English-speaking
DeOnle of the plobe