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 "hypothesis": "Chapter one. Origin. It engenders a whole world, for which red theft, and a hell, for which red hunger. Thus, idleness is the mother. She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger. What is slang? We have never understood this sort of objections. Slang is odious slang makes one shudder. Who denies that? Of course it does. When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society, since when has it been considered wrong to go too far, to go to the bottom? We have always thought that it was sometimes a courageous act, and, at least, a simple and useful deed worthy of the sympathetic attention which duty accepted and fulfilled merits, why should one not explore everything and study everything? Why should one halt on the way? Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming of slang. Now, when has horror ever excluded study? Since when has malady banished medicine? Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study the viper, the bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, and one who would cast them back into their darkness, saying, oh, how ugly that is. He would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. What is slang, properly speaking? It is the language of wretchedness. We may be stopped. The fact may be put to us in general terms, which is one way of attenuating it. We may be told that all trades, professions, it may be added, all the accidents of the social hierarchy, and all forms of intelligence have their own slang. The painter who says my grinder. The notary who says my skip the gutter. The hairdresser who says my mealy back. The cobbler who says my cub talks slang. There is the slang of the affected lady as well as of the press uses. The sugar manufacturer who says loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common, burnt. This honest manufacturer talks slang. Algebra, medicine, botany have each their slang. To meet the needs of this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is slang. To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf, were it but a fragment of some language, which man has spoken and which would otherwise be lost. That is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of which civilization is composed, or by which it is complicated to extend the records of social observation, is to serve civilization itself. Phoenician, very good, even dialect, let that pass. To this we reply in one word only, assuredly. If the tongue which a nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, the language which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention and study. And then we insist upon it, the study of social deformities and infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with the view to remedy, is not a business in which choice is permitted. He must descend with his heart full of charity and severity at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable casemates, who are crawl, pell mell those who bleed and those who deal the blow, those who weep and those who curse, those who fast and those who devour, those who endure evil and those who inflict it. Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted with the cavern? They constitute two different orders of facts which correspond to each other, which are always interlaced, and which often bring forth results. True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything. Facts form one of these and ideas the other. There it clothes itself in word masks, in metaphor rags. In this guise, it becomes horrible. One perceives without understanding it a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents, but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. One thinks one hears hydras talking. It is unintelligible in the dark. It is black in misfortune. It is blacker still in crime. These two blacknesses amalgamated compose slang. The earth is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Look closely at life. It is so made that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment. Each day has its own great grief for its little care. Yesterday, you were trembling for a health that is dear to you. Today, you fear for your own. Tomorrow, it will be anxiety about money. The day after, tomorrow, the diatribe of a slanderer. The day after that, the misfortune of some friend. Then the prevailing weather. Then something that has been broken or lost, then a pleasure with which your conscience and your vertebral column reproach you. Again, the course of public affairs, This without reckoning in the pains of the heart, and so it goes on. There is hardly one day out of a 100 which is wholly joyous and sunny, and you belong to that small class who are happy? In this world, evidently the vestibule of another, there are no fortunate. The real human division is this, the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous, that is the object. That is why we cry education, science. To teach reading means to light the fire. Every syllable spelled out sparkles. However, he who says light does not necessarily say joy. People suffer in the light. Excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing, to burn without ceasing to fly. Therein lies the marvel of genius."
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