Yet we have numbers of short words which have now become the ordinary names for certain articles, and yet which are only short forms of the original names of those articles. The first man who said _bus_ for "omnibus" must have seemed quite an adventurer. He probably struck those who heard him as a little vulgar; but hardly any one now uses the word _omnibus_ (which is in itself an interesting word, being the Latin word meaning "for all"), except, perhaps, the omnibus companies in their posters. Again, very few people use the full phrase "Zoological Gardens" now. Children are taken to the _Zoo_. _Cycle_ for "bicycle" is quite dignified and proper, though _bike_ is certainly vulgar. In the hurry of life to-day people more frequently _phone_ than "telephone" to each other, and we can send a wire instead of a "telegram" without any risk of vulgarity. The word _cab_ replaced the more magnificent "cabriolet," and then with the progress of invention we got the "taxicab." It is now the turn of _cab_ to be dropped, and when we are in haste we hail a _taxi_. No one nowadays, except the people who sell them, speaks of "pianofortes." They have all become _pianos_ in ordinary speech.
The way in which good English becomes slang is well illustrated by an essay of the great English writer Dean Swift, in the famous paper called "The Tatler," in 1710. He, as a fastidious user of English, was much vexed by what he called the "continual corruption of the English tongue." He objected especially to the clipping of words--the use of the first syllable of a word instead of the whole word. "We cram one syllable and cut off the rest," he said, "as the owl fattened her mice after she had cut off their legs to prevent their running away." One word the Dean seemed especially to hate--_mob_, which, indeed, was richer by one letter in his day, for he sometimes wrote it _mobb_. _Mob_ is, of course, quite good English now to describe a disorderly crowd of people, and we should think it very curious if any one used the full expression for which it stands. _Mob_ is short for the Latin phrase _mobile vulgus_, which means "excitable crowd."
Other words to which Swift objected, though most of them are not the words of one syllable with which he declared we were "overloaded," and which he considered the "disgrace of our language," were _banter_, _sham_, _bamboozle_, _bubble_, _bully_, _cutting_, _shuffling_, and _palming_. We may notice that some of these words, such as _banter_ and _sham_, are now quite good English, and most of the others have at least passed from the stage of slang into that of colloquialism.