Slang by Christian Union

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 4, 1882

Slang.

By Christian Union

It is almost impossible to have a profitable and reasonable conversation where persons have become struck through with the dry rot of slang, although it is not a thing to fight which one should put on the whole armor. It is like mosquitoes on a summer night, that are not lion-like, but that are annoying. It is vexatious to all those who love purity and simplicity of language, and not language adulterated with poisons of base material. While I would not turn a person out of the church because he used slang, yet, as an educator, as a pastor of young men and women, I would say that this is a habit very easy to acquire, very hard to cure, and very mischievous, disintegrating life, and disintegrating conversation which ought to be made musical as well as instructive. There is another style of idle words which is far more reprehensible than this. I mean vulgar and obscene speech. We must not suppose that this belongs to the sinks of vice, and to criminals. I have known persons corrupt in morals and manners whose conversation was very far from vulgar; and I have known persons of eminent moral worth whose conversation was seasoned with vulgarity—vulgar wit. It is unfortunate that there should be so much wit that is "broad," as it is called, which also is filthy, and that is fascinating to persons in whom the sense of wit is very acute and strong, flowing just under the surface of society among men.

Certainly there is a play of wit that leaves the smutty touch of the devil's finger on the surface of the disposition and the heart. Coarse allusions, double entendre—I cannot describe it; but human life is full of filth, of vulgarity, and of obscenity. A man may fall into it unintentionally; a man may be thrown into company in which he does not wish to seem like a Puritan; a man may be ashamed to be supposed to be absolutely pure and unapproachable by vulgar ideas; a man may wish to hear, to learn, to carry and to repeat long lines of incidents or of stories that should have gone into the filth pit. Every man, and, if it were possible to imagine that woman could indulge in anything so debasing, every woman should, by all the allegiance that they owe to the God of purity, and to the Lord Jesus Christ, avoid, or having fallen into it, should remedy that whole province of idle words, which revolves around an essential animalism.—Christian Union.