Life & Wisdom Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Chesterton’s line is a dare dressed up as a definition: if you look down on slang as linguistic graffiti, you’re already misreading what language is for. “All slang is metaphor” collapses the snob’s hierarchy between “proper” speech and street speech by pointing out that slang works the same way good literature does: it raids one domain of experience to electrify another. People don’t coin slang to be sloppy; they coin it to be vivid. Slang is what happens when a community needs a shortcut that also carries attitude, insider status, and a little theater.

Then he tightens the screw: “all metaphor is poetry.” Chesterton isn’t claiming every metaphor belongs in a sonnet; he’s insisting that poetry isn’t a gated genre but a mode of perception. Metaphor is the mind’s engine for surprise, compression, and reclassification. Call someone “a machine” or say you’re “drowning in emails” and you’ve made an argument about reality, not just a decorative flourish. Poetry, in his framing, is the moment language stops merely labeling and starts re-seeing.

The subtext is cultural and moral. Chesterton, a combative essayist in an era anxious about mass culture and “degenerate” modernity, defends the democratic genius of ordinary speech. Slang becomes evidence that creativity isn’t the property of elites; it bubbles up wherever people are alive to nuance. The intent is polemical: to shame the refined speaker who prides himself on clarity while quietly living off metaphors so old they’ve turned invisible.