“Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?” said Rosamond, with mild gravity.
“Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.”
“There is correct English: that is not slang.”
“I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”
George Eliot: Middlemarch
(taken from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ excellent post on literature, humanity and canon.)
Thoughts?