Chapter 254 Volume 7 Black Talk

"Pigritia" is a terrible word. It gave birth to a world, "la pegre," which means "theft," and a hell, "la pegrenne," which means "hunger." Therefore, laziness is the mother. She had a son named Thief, and a daughter named Hunger. What are we talking about now?Talk about slang. What is slang?It is nation and vernacular at the same time, it is the theft of both people and language. Thirty-four years ago, the narrator of this dire story, in another work with the same purpose as this one, described a slang-talking robber, which caused an uproar in the time. "What! What! Black talk! After all, black talk is too ugly! After all, it is said by the prisoners, the people in the penitentiaries, the people in the prison, the worst people in society!" Etc., etc., etc. .

We have never understood such objections. Since then, two great novelists, one is a profound observer of the human heart, the other is a brave friend of the people, Balzac and Eugène Sue, like the author of "The Last Days of a Condemned Man", have been together. Letting some bandits speak in their own language, as it did in 1828, aroused the same objection.People say over and over again: "What do these writers want from us when they write such disgusting slang? The slang is ugly! The slang is horrifying!" Who would deny this?Certainly not. When we want to look deeply into a wound, an abyss, or a society, since when has anyone said that "it is a mistake to go down too deep, to go down to the bottom"?We have always thought that looking deeply is sometimes a courageous act, or at least a simple and beneficial one, which is as worthy of attention and sympathy as accepting and completing the task.Not all detection, not all research, stop halfway, why should it be like this?Conditional restrictions can stop the detection work, but the detector should not stop the work.

Of course, to get down to the bottom of the social structure, to search where the soil runs out and the mud begins, to search in the slimy turbid stream, to grab and hold that vulgar, mud-tick language, that pus-blood blur Every word is like a dirty part of those strange insects in the dark place in the filthy soil, and it is thrown alive in the sun and in front of everyone. This is not an attractive job, nor is it an easy job.There is nothing more miserable than to behold, in the light of thought, an appalling mass of slang that is uttered openly.It is indeed like a monster that has just been fished out of a dirty pool without seeing the sun.People seem to see a living and horrible thorny thorn, twitching, crawling, jumping, burrowing into the dark place, staring and bluffing.One word is like a claw, another is like a bleeding blind eye, a certain sentence is like a claw that opens and closes.It was all alive, moving with the hideous vitality of something disordered and ordered.

Now we have to ask, since when have ugly things been excluded and not studied?Since when did disease drive out the doctor?A man who refuses to study vipers, bats, scorpions, centipedes, spiders, and beats them back into their holes when he sees them, and says at the same time: "Ah! This is so ugly!" scientist?A thinker who turns his back on slang is like a surgeon who turns his back on ulcers.This is also like a linguist who doesn't want to study the practical problems of language, or a philosopher who doesn't want to delve into the practical problems of human beings.Therefore, it must be made clear to those who do not know the truth that slang is a miracle in the field of literature and a product of human society.What is the so-called slang?Slang is the language of the poor.

At this point, one can stop us, one can apply this truth widely to other fields, although the extensive application can sometimes have a dilute effect, and one can say to us that all trades, all occupations, may also be added. All classes in the world, all kinds of knowledge have their slang words.Merchants say "Montpellier is available," "Marseilles of the highest quality"; money changers say "delayed delivery, fees at the end of the month"; card players say "clear pass, spades over"; courts in the Normandy Islands The bailiff says "where the tenant has an injunction, no proceeds can be claimed from the lot in declaring inheritance to the estate of the refusor"; the farce writer says "boo"; the comedy writer says "I'm broken"; Philosophers say "tripleness"; hunters say "red fowl, eat fowl"; bone physicists say "friendly, belligerent, keen on secrets"; infantrymen say "my clarinet"; cavalrymen say "my little turkey "; the swordsman says "three degrees, four degrees, dash"; the printer says "add lead"; The bailiffs, the card players, the money changers, the merchants, are all slang.The painter says "my brush"; the notary "my jumper"; the barber "my assistant"; the shoemaker "my helper" is also slang.Strictly speaking, if we must look at it that way, all those ways of expressing right and left, "starboard" and "port" by sailors, "courtyard" and "garden" by stage crews, The words "of the saints" and "of the Gospel" by the church servants are still slang words.In the past, there were gossip about talented women, and today there are gossip about young ladies.The mansion of Rambouille is not far from the area of ​​the Holy Land.There is also the Duchess' slang, as evidenced by a love letter written by a very noble and beautiful lady during the Restoration: "You have a lot of grounds for all these slanders, and I have to escape. It came out." The numbers and codes in the diplomatic circles are also slang words. The State Council of the Holy See uses "twenty-six" as the code name of Rome, "grkztntgzyal" as the code name of the envoy, and "abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI" as the code name of the Duke of Modena, It is slang.Medieval doctors called carrots, radishes, and turnips "opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalmus, dracatholicum angelorum, postmegorum," and they were slang.When the sugar miller says "granulated sugar, lump sugar, purified sugar, refined lump sugar, mulled sugar wine, brown sugar sand, lump sugar, sugar cube," the honest miller is speaking slang.A certain faction of critics used to say twenty years ago that "half Shakespeare is witty wordplay and puns," and they were speaking slang.Two poets and artists said significantly that if M. de Montmorency was not a master of rhyme and sculpture, they would call him "bourgeois", which is also slang.The academicians of the classical Academy of Sciences called flowers "Flora", fruit "Pomona", sea "Nipton", love "blood in fire", beauty "charming", horses "good running", white The cockade or tricolor cockade reads "Belona's Rose" and the cocked hat "Mas's Triangle", the classical academician is speaking slang.Algebra, medicine, botany also have their jargon.The language used by people on board, Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperet, etc., whistled in the wind on sails, masts, and ropes, and the megaphone issued orders, fighting with knives and axes on the side, the hull rolled, the wind roared, and the cannons roared The very complete, very original, and admirable maritime language used in the book is also a complete kind of slang, but this heroic slang is indeed compared with the rough slang that is current in the world of ghosts and ghosts. Lions and jackals.

There is no doubt about it.However, no matter what people say, this way of understanding the word slang is still in a broad sense, and it is not acceptable to everyone.For our part, we shall preserve for the word its old exact, distinct, fixed meaning, and confine slang to slang.The real slang, the brilliant slang (assuming the two words can be linked together), the slang too old to be a kingdom of its own, we repeat, is nothing but the hideous, startling, Insidious, treacherous, vicious, cruel, ambiguous, vile, secretive, ominous language.At the end of depravity and wretchedness, there is a desperately poor man who rebels, and decides to throw himself into the struggle against the totality of happiness and the ruling laws, a terrible struggle, sometimes cunning, sometimes violent, both sinister and vicious, It attacks the social order with the needle (by means of evil) and with the club (by crime).In order to meet the needs of this struggle, the poor invented a fighting language, which is slang.

To take any language spoken by man, that is to say, one of the elements that constitutes or complicates civilization, whether good or bad, complete or not, to save it from oblivion and dry well, to render it To survive, not to perish, is to furnish observations of society, and to contribute to civilization itself.Plautus, knowingly or not, made this contribution by making two Carthaginian soldiers talk in Phoenician; Conversation, too, makes this contribution.Here comes the objection again: Phoenician, excellent!Oriental, also very good!Even the dialect is acceptable!These are the languages ​​of a certain country or province.But this nonsense?What good is there in keeping the slang?What good is there in letting slang "survive"?

To this, we intend to answer only one sentence.If the language spoken in a country or province is worthy of concern, there is something more deserving of study than the language spoken by a poor class. This language, in France, for example, has been spoken for more than four hundred years, not only by a certain class of the poor, but by the whole class of the poor, the whole class of the poor that may exist in human beings. Moreover, we want to emphasize that the study of social deformities and disabilities, revealing them so as to be cured, this kind of work must not be chosen or abandoned solely on the basis of personal likes and dislikes.The task of the historian of customs and ideas is by no means less serious than that of the historian of great events.The latter studies the superficial layers of civilization, the struggles for crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, wars, councils, famous men, vicissitudes under the sun, all superficial things; It is content, substance, labor, suffering, waiting people, oppressed women, moaning children, infighting between men, covert atrocities, prejudices, overt unequal treatment, secret counterattacks of the law, spiritual struggles. The secret evolution, the subtle tremors of the masses, the starving, the barefoot, the helpless, the orphans, the destitute, the disgraced, and all the ghosts that wander in the dark.With compassion and at the same time he should go down into the impenetrable pits, and approach as brother and judge those who hustle there, bloody and violent the weeping and the cursing, the hungry and the chewing, the swallowing and the wicked.Are these historians who look into the minds of men less responsible than those who study external things?Who can think that Dante has less to say than Machiavelli?Is the background of civilization less important than the appearance because it is more profound and dark?Before we know the cave, can we say that we have recognized the mountain?

Let us also note in passing that, from the few sentences above, we can infer two distinct classes of historians, a distinction which does not exist in our minds.A historian who studies the public, visible, and manifest mass life of peoples is not a good historian if he does not at the same time gain insight into their hidden, deeper lives; It is impossible to be a good historian of inner things by being a historian of outer things when necessary.The history of customs and ideas is imbued with the history of events, and vice versa.These are two different kinds of things that influence each other, are always related to each other, and often cause and effect each other.The lines that God has drawn on the surface of a nation must have dark but distinct parallels, and any disturbance in its depths must cause the surface to shake.Since history is all-encompassing, the true historian should ask everything.

Man is not a circle with only one center, it is an ellipse with two foci.Things are one point, thoughts are another. Slang is nothing but a dressing-room for language to change its face when it is about to do something bad.Here it trades phrases like masks and metaphors like rags. In this way, it becomes hideous. People can barely recognize its true face.Is this indeed the French language, the great language of mankind?It's ready to go on stage, to cover a crime, and to play any role in a bad show.It no longer walks well, but limps. It hobbles forward with its two armpit on the crutches in the sanctuary area, and the crutches can be transformed into a stick. All kinds of strange appearances, it crawls, and can also raise its head up, like a snake.From then on it can play any role, the faker turns it into a squint, the poisoner makes it coppery, the arsonist paints it with pine smoke, the murderer puts rouge on it.

When we are at the door of society, listening from the side of the honest man, our ears will catch the conversation of some outsiders.We can make out some questions and some answers.We heard a hideous voice whispering, not knowing what to say, like a human voice, but more like a dog barking than a human voice.This is slang.Those characters are misshapen, with a taste of unknown monsters.We seemed to hear the hydra talking. This is ghost language in the dark.Rolling and chattering, opening and closing like the wind, as if listening to people guess riddles at dusk.People's eyes are dark when they are suffering, and even darker when they commit crimes. These two kinds of blackness condense to form slang.Black in the sky, black in action, black in language.This is a terrible toad language, which jumps to and fro in a vast yellow mist of rain, night, hunger, adultery, fraud, violence, nudity, poison gas, severe winter (the spring and autumn of the poor), Crouching, saliva splashing, twisting the body like a monster. We should have compassion for those who are being punished.well!Who are we ourselves?Who am I that talks to you?Who are you listening to me?Where are we from?Who can be sure that we did nothing before we were born?The earth and the prison are not without similarities.Who can say that people are not prisoners sent to prison again under the rules of heaven? Close your eyes to examine life carefully.Looking at it from every aspect, we will feel that a person's life is full of punishment. Are you a person who is called happy?Well, but you don't have a single day that you don't worry about.Every day has big worries or small worries.Yesterday you trembled over the health of a loved one, today you worry about your own, tomorrow money troubles, the day after a slanderer, bad news from a friend the day after tomorrow, weather problems Another time, something was broken or lost, another happy event happened, but my heart was disturbed or my spine felt uncomfortable; another time it was a matter of business progress.Not counting all kinds of pain in my heart, it's endless, one dark cloud scattered, and another dark cloud came again.Rarely in a hundred days is one day full of joy and sunshine.What else did you say that you belong to the few people who enjoy happiness!As for the rest of the people, they stayed in the dark night that was always dark. Thoughtful people seldom use such phrases as happy people and unhappy people.This world is clearly the antechamber of another, and there are no happy people here. The real division of human beings is this: those in the light and those in the dark. To reduce the number of those in darkness and increase the number of those in light is the purpose.That's why we cry out: EDUCATION!science!To learn to read is to light a torch, and every word and every syllable shoots sparks. But light is not necessarily joy.Man still suffers in the light, and excess light can cause burning.Fire is the enemy of wings.Burning without stopping flying is just a miracle of the gods. When you have realized and loved, you will still suffer.At the dawn of dawn, there are tears everywhere.People in the light think of their kind in the dark, and can't weep.