| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: what one sees.
In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the language.
It uses it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard,
and it often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it
in a gross and summary fashion. Occasionally, with the ordinary
words thus deformed and complicated with words of pure slang,
picturesque phrases are formed, in which there can be felt the mixture
of the two preceding elements, the direct creation and the metaphor:
le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri,
the dog is barking, I suspect that the diligence for Paris is passing
through the woods. Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussiere,
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: Bridge, safe, pleasant, and cheap. But, Mr. Piper, you who are a
shrewd arithmetician, did it never occur to you to calculate how
many fools' heads, which might have produced an idea or two in
the year, if suffered to remain in quiet, get effectually addled
by jolting to and fro in these flying chariots of yours; how many
decent countrymen become conceited bumpkins after a cattle-show
dinner in the capital, which they could not have attended save
for your means; how many decent country parsons return critics
and spouters, by way of importing the newest taste from
Edinburgh? And how will your conscience answer one day for
carrying so many bonny lasses to barter modesty for conceit and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: court, Hob marched on in awful immobility. There appeared upon the face
of this attitude in the family the consequences of some dreadful feud.
Presumably the two women had been principals in the original encounter,
and the laird had probably been drawn into the quarrel by the ears, too
late to be included in the present skin-deep reconciliation.
"Kirstie," said Archie one day, "what is this you have against your
family?"
"I dinna complean," said Kirstie, with a flush. "I say naething."
"I see you do not - not even good-day to your own nephew," said he.
"I hae naething to be ashamed of," said she. "I can say the Lord's
prayer with a good grace. If Hob was ill, or in preeson or poverty, I
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