Every one knows what a "stunning blow" is, but few people can ever have been stunned by the beauty of another's clothes. Yet the expression "stunning hat" or "stunning tie" is quite common. Expressions like a "ripping time" are even more objectionable, because they are even more meaningless.
Then, besides the slang use of terms of praise, there are also many superlatives expressing disgust which the slangmongers use instead of ordinary mild expressions of displeasure. To such people it is not simply "annoying" to have to wait for a lift on the underground railways; for them it is "perfectly sickening."
_Horrid_, a word which means so much if used properly, is applied to all sorts of slightly unpleasant things and people. When one thinks of the literal Latin meaning of this word ("so dreadful as to cause us to shudder"), the foolishness of using it so lightly is plain. People frequently now declare that they have a "shocking cold"--a description which, again, is too violent for the subject.
Another form of slang is to combine a word which generally expresses unpleasant with one which expresses pleasant ideas. So we get such expressions as "awfully nice" and "frightfully pleased," which are actually contradictions in terms.
This kind of slang is the worst kind of all. It soon loses any spice of novelty. It is not really expressive, like some of the quaint terms of school or university slang, and it does a great deal of harm by tending to spoil the full force of some of our best and finest words. It is very difficult to avoid the use of slang if one is constantly hearing it, but, at any rate, any one who feels the beauty of language must soon be disgusted by this particular kind of slang.
We have seen in the chapter on "slang" how people are continually using old words in new ways, and how, through this, slang often becomes good English and good English becomes slang. The same thing has been going on all through the history of language. Other words besides those used as slang have been constantly getting new uses. Many English words to-day have quite different meanings from those which they had in the Middle Ages; some even have exactly opposite meanings to their original sense. Sometimes words keep both the old meaning and the new.