As many of our readers may know, I’m a defender of languages threatened by mass media. It pains me to consider that one great limb of our linguistic family tree, the Celtic, is in very rough shape. How extensive those languages used to be, especially from about 500 B. C. to the time of Christ, we can gather from important names for where Celtic peoples lived: Gaul (on both sides of the Alps), Galicia in what is now Spain, Galatia in what is now Turkey, and of course the British isles, and the part of France still called Brittany. But right now, among the six still living Celtic languages, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish, two of them have been revived from the dead (Manx, Cornish), and only Welsh is not threatened, though only one of six Welshmen can speak it.
What I say about languages I might also say about dialects, and even about our Word of the Week, slang. I don’t look forward to when there will be only one form of English, or when everybody in the world will speak it. I suppose there’s something just as bad as Babel, where nobody could understand anybody else. That’s when everybody will understand everybody else, because everybody will be saying the same stupid things, world without end. In a way, then, slang can be not only the source of new and colorful words and sayings; it can be a protection for old and even more colorful words and sayings. We say, “Don’t buy a pig in a poke,” meaning, “Don’t buy a pig in a pouch,” that is, a big pouch, a sack — and what lover of English would be content to lose that saying with its old slang? In most of the United States, that big sandwich with meat and cheese and lettuce and tomato and onions and peppers is a submarine, but in some places it’s a hero, where I grew up in Pennsylvania it’s a hoagie, in Louisiana it’s a po’-boy, but here in New Hampshire, and in an arc cutting through southern New England down into New Jersey, it’s a grinder. Don’t ask me why. And then there are those colorful off-color words for certain parts of the body, sometimes coarse, sometimes humorous. I needn’t get into those, right? Except to say that for my money the most humorous of them all is exactly right for working-class slang poking fun at the working-class themselves: the family jewels!
Quite a few poets and novelists go out of their way to use the slang of farmers, infantrymen, miners, and others who aren’t using the King’s English at Oxford. Such slang helps to characterize a person in his social class or the place where he lives or works — the mountains, on board a ship, along the shores, with the British army in India, and so forth. I could have chosen “Gunga Din” by Kipling, for example — and that’s hardly the only poem Kipling wrote in slang. And we’ve got the same kind of thing from Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, George MacDonald, Robert Louis Stevenson, and many others. Stevenson? Think of the drunken song of the old sinner Billy Bones, singing “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!” But it wasn’t just British writers; James Fenimore Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo speaks in an upstate New York slang, and if we lost the slang of Huck Finn and Jim, we’d lose most of their personalities to boot. Listen to the very opening of Huckleberry Finn, and you will sense how, in only a few sentences, a whole personality, that arch and clear-sighted boy Huck, begins to come to life:
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book called ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly — Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is — and Mary, and the widow Douglas, is all told about in that book — which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.
But I’ve chosen for our Poem of the Week a little poem by an American who usually wrote in slang, and usually for light-hearted or sentimental work. He’s James Whitcomb Riley. He published a lot in my favorite popular magazine from the late 1800’s, The Century, but not usually where you would find the serious lyric poems, the ones they’d use to take up the rest of a page at the end of an article on science or politics or theology or the arts or anything else of social or spiritual or technological or artistic interest. They’d set him with several pages of humorous verse, “In Lighter Vein,” at the end of the editorials and letters to the editor, at the back of each issue, with many a comic drawing attached. Apparently Riley was much beloved, nor did he earn any scorn for his light poems, because there was plenty of room in people’s minds and hearts for all kinds of poetry, which was a far more important and cherished part of many people’s lives than we can now imagine.
Riley uses slangy grammar and pronunciation, often signaling them to us by a deliberate misspelling, to encourage us to hear the peculiarities of the old sentimentalist looking back on his boyish days. As I said, it’s light-hearted — yet, for all that, there’s a touch at the end that elevates the poem to a more solemn consideration, solemnity with a sure touch of humor to it. Boys in those days shucked their clothes to go swimming, and so Riley’s speaker, now an old man, looks forward to the time when there will be another kind of dip in the water.
Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! whare the crick so still and deep Looked like a baby-river that was laying half asleep, And the gurgle of the worter round the drift jest below Sounded like the laugh of something we onc't ust to know Before we could remember anything but the eyes Of the angels lookin' out as we left Paradise; But the merry days of youth is beyond our controle, And it's hard to part ferever with the old swimmin'-hole. Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! In the happy days of yore, When I ust to lean above it on the old sickamore, Oh! it showed me a face in its warm sunny tide That gazed back at me so gay and glorified, It made me love myself, as I leaped to caress My shadder smilin' up at me with sich tenderness. But them days is past and gone, and old Time's tuck his toll From the old man come back to the old swimmin'-hole. Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! In the long, lazy days When the humdrum of school made so many run-a-ways, How plesant was the jurney down the old dusty lane, Whare the tracks of our bare feet was all printed so plane You could tell by the dent of the heel and the sole They was lots o' fun on hands at the old swimmin'-hole. But the lost joys is past! Let your tears in sorrow roll Like the rain that ust to dapple up the old swimmin'-hole. Thare the bullrushes growed, and the cattails so tall, And the sunshine and shadder fell over it all; And it mottled the worter with amber and gold Tel the glad lilies rocked in the ripples that rolled; And the snake-feeder's four gauzy wings fluttered by Like the ghost of a daisy dropped out of the sky, Or a wownded apple-blossom in the breeze's controle As it cut acrost some orchard to'rds the old swimmin'-hole. Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! When I last saw the place, The scenes was all changed, like the change in my face; The bridge of the railroad now crosses the spot Whare the old divin'-log lays sunk and fergot. And I stray down the banks whare the trees ust to be— But never again will theyr shade shelter me! And I wish in my sorrow I could strip to the soul, And dive off in my grave like the old swimmin'-hole.
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