Slang

There is general agreement among authorities that slang is, in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary , “Language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense.” However, there is also an accepted difficulty, acknowledged by lexicographers, over which words should be allocated as “slang,” given the overlap with the related categories of “colloquial,” “informal,” “jargon,” and “cant.” In the 1930s the American lexicographer Clarence L. Barnhart invited a number of major authorities, American and British, to mark a dictionary manuscript for levels of usage, “but there was little agreement among them” (in Morton 1994, 251). James Murray himself suffered a prolonged indecision over whether to include bounder in the OED , an anxiety which now seems trivial. The Preface to the major recent contribution to the field, the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang , concedes that “no commonly accepted definition of slang has won much favor among linguists, who mostly regard the boundaries between slang and other levels of discourse as too insubstantial for analysis” (1994, xi).

Considering the importance of the category, the term slang itself is a surprisingly recent coinage, dating from the mid-eighteenth century, when the primary sense overlapped with cant , a much older word meaning “the special vocabulary used by a set of persons of a low or disreputable character,” thus “language of a low and vulgar type.” The word was not in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), but Francis Grose in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) simply defined slang as “cant language.” Grose’s Preface (quoted in his entry) makes it clear that slang consists of the in-group code-words of urban sets, many of them criminal. These disreputable origins clearly colored subsequent definitions, such as that by Greenhough and Kittredge in 1902, that slang is “A peculiar kind of vagabond language, always hanging on the outskirts of legitimate speech, but continually straying or forcing its way into the most respectable company” (55). The origin is also disputed, but probably comes from canting usage.

However, the hierarchical model which places slang down the sociolinguistic ladder only offers one perspective. In the magisterial Preface to the OED , Sir James Murray wrote of “the slang and cant of various ‘sets’ and classes,” such as “nautical slang,” “public school slang,” and “the slang of the Stock Exchange” (xvii). Eric Partridge’s excellent study Slang (1933) similarly has twenty-five categories, including overseas varieties such as Australian, Indian, and American English. Robert L. Chapman’s New Dictionary of American Slang (1986) gives a kaleidoscopic image of about a dozen sources of varieties of slang that make up the whole field (xviii). These include the different branches of the armed forces, hobos and tramps, the underworld, narcotics, jazz, finance, immigrants, baseball, show business, finance, and college students. They thus range from respectable professions to the criminal underworld.

The common factor in these categories is that slang terms form a sociolinguistic barrier within which insiders identify themselves through passwords that are initially unfamiliar and thus disturbing to outsiders. This has generally been truer of British than American and Australian usage, which are more accepting of the lower registers. In the Introduction to his Slang Thesaurus , Jonathon Green quotes the dictum of Dr. J.Y.T. Greig in 1938: “The chief stimuli of slang are sex, money and intoxicating liquor,” adding his own comment: “Bowing to current events one must add drugs to the list” (1986, xiii). Although slang is now more acceptable than the previous definitions suggest, the most important point is the awareness that in the past the use of slang formed an affront or insult of some kind. The verbal sense of slang , “to rail in abusive or vulgar language” is recorded from 1828. This practice is encapsulated in the slanging match , an exchange of abuse or a vituperative argument, recorded from 1896, with evident affinities to flyting. It is anticipated by the much earlier American term slangwhang , found as a noun from 1834 in the sense of “violent or abusive language,” as well as in the form slangwhanging from 1809, and as a verb from 1880.

A number of points need to be made concerning the antiquity of slang and its survival. As the entry for dictionaries shows, the earliest vestigial glossaries of the language explicated not proper usage but cant or underground language. It is also often maintained that slang is ephemeral, in the words of Dr. Johnson, a “fugitive cant unworthy of preservation.” While this is largely true, slang continues to flourish: indeed a century ago G.K. Chesterton asserted that “the one stream of poetry which is constantly flowing is slang” (in Partridge 1933, 24). Furthermore, there are some remarkable instances of slang terms which have survived for centuries, despite sometimes disappearing from the written record for decades. Among slang terms which are over two centuries old are hump and shag for “copulate,” leak for “urinate,” tool for “penis,” twat for “vagina,” frig for “masturbate,” crap for “defecate,” cove for “man,” beak for “judge,” pig for “policeman,” and freak-out for “orgasm.” Finally, dictionaries of slang continue to proliferate.