The Language of the Street
Written by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1840)
The Language Of The Street Is Always Strong. What can describe the folly and
emptiness of scolding like the word jawing? I feel too the force of the double
negative, though clean contrary to our grammar rules. And I confess to some
pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckmen and
teamsters. How laconic and brisk it is by the side of a page of the North American
Review. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they
walk and run. Moreover they who speak them have this elegancy, that they do not
trip in their speech. It is a shower of bullets, whilst Cambridge men and Yale men
correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence.