H. L. Mencken

“ The true place of their origin is the perch of the newspaper reporters, whose competence and compensation is largely estimated, at least on papers of wide circulation, by their capacity for inventing novelties. The supply is so large that connoisseurship has grown up; an extra-fecund slang-maker on the press has his following. ”

“ Brander Matthews, so recently as 1901, though to hold up slang; it is now perfectly good American.
The contrary movement of words from the legitimate vocabulary into slang is constantly witnessed. Some one devises a new and arresting trope or makes use of an old one under circumstances arresting the public attention, and at once it is adopted into slang, given a host of remote significances, and ding-donged ad nauseam. The Rooseveltian phrases, muck-raker, Ananias Club, short and ugly word, nature-faker and big-stick, offer examples. ”

“ If he chooses words carefully, with a full understanding of their meaning and savor, then no word that he uses seriously will belong to slang, but if his speech is made up chiefly of terms poll-parroted, and he has no sense of their shades and limitations, then slang will bulk largely in his vocabulary. ”

“ The theory, unluckily, is combated by many plain facts. To hand it to him, to get away with it and even to hand him a lemon are certainly not metaphors that transcend the practicable and probable, and yet all are undoubtedly slang. On the other hand, there is palpable exaggeration in such phrases as “he is not worth the powder it would take to kill him,” in such adjectives as break-bone (fever) , and in such compounds as fire-eater, and yet it would be absurd to dismiss them as slang. ”

“ The practising authors of the country, like its philologians, have always shown a gingery and suspicious attitude. “The use of slang,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is at once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy.” “Slang,” said Ambrose Bierce fifty years later, “is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage cans on their way to the dumps.” Literature in America, as we have seen, remains aloof from the vulgate. Despite the contrary examples of Mark Twain and Howells, all of the more pretentious American authors try to write chastely and elegantly ”

“ Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom by setting up the doctrine that the former is “more expressive than the situation demands.” “It is,” he says, “a kind of hyperesthesia in the use of language. To laugh in your sleeve is idiom because it arises out of a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from the picture of one raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a metaphor which arose naturally enough in early periods when sleeves were long and flowing ”

“ Shoo-fly afflicted the American people for at least two years, and “I don’t think” and aber nit quite as long. Even “good-night” lasted a whole year.
A very large part of our current slang is propagated by the newspapers, and much of it is invented by newspaper writers. One need but turn to the slang of baseball to find numerous examples. Such phrases as to clout the sphere, the initial sack, to slam the pill and the dexter meadow are obviously not of bleachers manufacture. There is not enough imagination in that depressing army to devise such things ”

“ The English newspapers, with the exception of a few anomalies such as Pink-Un, lean in the other direction; their fault is not slanginess, but an otiose ponderosity—in Dean Alford’s words, “the insisting on calling common things by uncommon names ”