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Show well as the needs of aftertime. Those, of course, stay with us. They really supply a lone felt w&nt, and are mode to do permanent per-manent duty. But even for these, so far as I know, it is always impossible to find responsible authors au-thors of their being. The newspapers and magazines will, subsequently, take the thing up and give derivations of these words and expound their origin and birthplace, but even they have never been able to find the real father of aDj of these graphic expressions. And that, I repeat, is singular. No more so, however, how-ever, than the extraordinarily rapid man-1 ner in which these words or phrases become, be-come, for a time at least, the common property of the whole nation. .. A case comes to my mind which illustrates this. It was in 1877. , In May of that year I joined Capt. Blackwell, an old friend of mine, in a long trip to Chinese waters. I went from here to Sau Francisco, where his vessel lay. Our journey to Shanghai was a. short one. Passing down one of the main streets of that Chinese port the next afternoon, Capt. Blackwell and myself were run into and almost knocked into the gutter by a trio of sailors from tho United States man-of-war Kearsarge. The fellows were evidently spoiling for a fight, and to avoid trouble we passed on w ithout saying anything, ' when one of them sang out in a stentorian oice: 'Shoot that hat!' He referred to my somewhat battered headgear. Now, the point I wanted to make was this: The Kearsarge had come from San Francisco. Fran-cisco. When I had left Chicago that piece of slang about discarding or otherwise other-wise abusing one's hat had not yet reached that city. Our journey " to Shanghai had been made in less than the average time. Yet here was this sailor from the Kearsarge addressing me thousands of miles away from home, with an absolutely. new ohrase. , It must nave reachea'san TTancisco Just in time for this ruffian to have picked it up and to lug it with him to China and fling it at my inoffensive head." Chicago Herald. Her-ald. . ' SLANG AND ITS ORIGIN. THERE ARE NEVER ANY ROWS OVER AUTHORSHIP CLAIMS. Phrase, and "Gags" That tin for Brief Period in Popularity No One Acknowledge. Acknowl-edge. Hvlu Evolved the Hoat Striking and Funny Saying.. "Did it ever strike you," said Capt. Fitzruaurice, an old retired navigator with a quizzical turn of mind, "how odd it is that the origin of all the 'gags' and slang phrases that run riot for a spell from Cape Cod to the Golden Gate never become be-come known? It is odd, now, isn't it?" The reporter acknowledged that it was. "Because, don't you see," continued the captain, "the people of this generation have not, among their other failings and shortcomings, the failing of excessive modesty. Every man, in fact, who does, says or thinks something worth mention, or thinks he thinks, for that matter, generally gen-erally conies to the front and acknowledges acknowl-edges that it was he and none other who said, did or thought this or that. Often the troublo is to lind out who was the real original Jacobs among them all, so numerous are the claims put forth by different persons that they are the thinkers, think-ers, sayers and doers of something remarkable. re-markable. Now, with all this being true, I take it to bo an extraordinary thing that in not a singlo instance has ther been a man or woman coming forward and acknowledging the authorship of any of these terse, picturesque or roughly rough-ly slangy expressions that sweep the country like & whilwind and then die out, leaving uo trace. 60MB OLD O.NE8. , "And it is remarkable how sometimes they die out as quickly as they spread. If track were kept of them all or a regular reg-ular register by somebody this assertion would be more susceptible of proof. But I can recall a number of cases of this kind, even without having anything to aid my memory.. You remember that gag about .'How do you sagatiate?' or, 'How is your corporosity;" They spread over tho country inside of a month, being In everybody's mouth; and then they just as quickly sank into tho bottomless pit r F tl.A . . . i . T . . jmiou. vuuLuiu mj buy 110c one man in u thousand could recall cither of the two queer expressions on the spur of the moment if required to do so. It was tho sauio with that old 'Tom Collins' gag, tho original of tho BIcGinty gag of today. That was put on its legs early in 1874 in New York, I think, and within three weeks it had traveled as far as San Francisco. Fran-cisco. A man couldn't put his nose into the s'.reet in the spring and summer of that year without hearing some refereuco to the mythical Tom Collins, and a score of topical songs were started at Tony Pht-tor's, Pht-tor's, and at the other variety theatres and concert halls, all with Tom Collins in them. In tho fall of that year Tom Collins Col-lins was as dead as a door nail, with no hope of ever resurrecting him. There have been, to my personal recollection, a long string of similar words or catch phrases coined, set in general circulation and then squelched within tho past twenty years alone. Others have lost much of their one time popularity, but have survived after a fashion, like 'Where did you get that hat?' 'Cheese it!' 'Coma off 1' 'Get on to his nibs!' 'And the band played Annie Laurie!' 'Johnny, get your gun!' 'No Hies on him!' 'Has' your mother any more like you?' 'They all do it!' 'Have you got the mate to it?' 'Shoot that hat!' 'Pull down thn hlinrisl1 'Ri-l- away!' and a whole lot of others. You remember when that shibboleth 'Chestnuts!' 'Chest-nuts!' was first manufactured? No? Well, neither do I. It seems a century ago the expression appears to us to be as old as Methuselah. And yet it can't be so many years ago when it first originated. Remember the chestnut bells and the lively home industry that sprang up in that article makers and dealers even advertising heavily to effect sales, and territory for the sales agents being farmed out, mucli as it is by the sewing machine companies for their agents. Yes, all that happened quite recently, and where do you hear a chestnut bell tinkling now? Nowhere. It has done its duty." A "QAG8" QUICK TRIP. "At the same time," ventured the reporter, re-porter, interrupting tho smooth current ! of the old captain's talk, "there seem to ! be some slang phrases and slangy songs ' that are enjoying a green old age even ' today." I "Theso are exceptions rare excep-tions excep-tions to the general rule. And wheu T think of tho huge mass of short lived i slang expressions, many of them enjov- j ing existence no longer'than those saiid ; flies we have with us during a summer day, these exceptions seem all the rarer. There are certain words which arise in this 6ame sudden and impersonal way, such as 'dude' .and. 'mugwump,' etc., |