by miscalling it, with grim pleasantry, the architecture of the nursery.  Finite and quite rigid words are not, in any sense that holds good of bricks.  They move and change, they wax and wane, they wither and burgeon; from age to age, from place to place, from mouth to mouth, they are never at a stay.  They take on colour, intensity, and vivacity from the infection of neighbourhood; the same word is of several shapes and diverse imports in one and the same sentence; they depend on the building that they compose for the very chemistry of the stuff that composes them.  The same epithet is used in the phrases “a fine day” and “fine irony,” in “fair trade” and “a fair goddess.”  Were different symbols to be invented for these sundry meanings the art of literature would perish.  For words carry with them all the meanings they have worn, and the writer shall be judged by those that he selects for prominence in the train of his thought.  A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism, in the common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors.  A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance authorises readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa, and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sun.  In choosing a sense for your words you choose also an audience for them.

To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as it falls in the sentence, according as its successive ties and associations are broken or renewed.  And here, seeing that the stupidest of all possible meanings is very commonly the slang meaning, it will be well to treat briefly of slang.  For slang, in the looser acceptation of the term, is of two kinds, differing, and indeed diametrically opposite, in origin and worth.  Sometimes it is the technical diction that has perforce been coined to name the operations, incidents, and habits of some way of life that society despises or deliberately elects to disregard.  This sort of slang, which often invents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is vivid, accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to the world’s dictionaries and of compass to the world’s range of thought.  Society, mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens in any habitual name, seems to have become aware, by one of those wonderful processes of chary instinct which serve the great, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a brain, that to accept of the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of his trade is to accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the question of property.  For this reason, and by no special masonic precautions of his own, the pickpocket is allowed to keep the admirable devices of his nomenclature for the familiar uses of himself