Slang

“ Unless, therefore, you wish your intellectual processes to be as hazy and haphazard as those of mental shirkers and loafers, you must eschew, not necessarily all slang, but all heedless, all habitual use of it. Now and then a touch of slang, judiciously chosen, is effective; now and then it fulfils a legitimate purpose of language. But normally you should express yourself as befits one who has at his disposal the rich treasuries of the dictionary instead of a mere stock of greasy counterfeit phrases. ”

“ The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. ”

“ The grace and fun of the story, the odd effects produced by bad grammar, the gentle humour, all combine to make this decidedly slangy chapter a literary masterpiece. A miner or rancheman will talk to you for an hour and delight you, because his slang somehow fits his peculiar thought accurately; an English sailor will tell a story, and he will use one slang word in every three that come out of his mouth, yet he is delightful, for the simple reason that his distorted dialect enables him to express and not to suppress truth. ”

“ Among the many signs of the corruption of the English language, one, which is not the least remarkable, is the prevalent use of slang words and phrases. That certain terms should be peculiar to certain callings, trades, or professions, may be naturally expected, but that these should be extended into general conversation, is a corroborative proof of the strong liking people now have for any thing unusual or out-of-the-way. ”

“ The squeamishness which tries to ignore the existence of slang fails signally, for not only in the streets and the prisons, but at the bar, on the bench, in the pulpit, and in the Houses of Parliament, does slang make itself heard, and, as the shortest and safest means to an end, understood too. ”

“ But now I find a great many who have advanced to a slang beyond that of verbal expressions,—a slang of mind, a slang of sentiment, a slang in which very little seems left of the woman and nothing at all of the lady.
Newspaper essayists assert that the young men of the day are to blame for this; that the young men like it; and the fair husband-anglers dress their flies in the colours most likely to attract a nibble. ”

“ Besides the fact that slang often becomes good English, we have to notice that good English often becomes slang. One of the most common forms of slang is to use words, and especially adjectives, which mean a great deal in themselves to describe quite small and ordinary things. ”

“ There is no use of profane or unclean words, and yet this slangy mode of speech is the little rift within the lute that, by and by, will make all the music of the fine womanly conversation not mute, but drowned in a hubbub of loud sounds and common words. The girl who continually uses slang as naturally elevates her voice as she breathes ”

“ The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. Every day a nameless poet weaves some fairy tracery of popular language. It may be said that the fashionable world talks slang as much as the democratic; this is true, and it strongly supports the view under consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the heavy, formal, lifeless slang of the man-about-town and the light, living, and flexible slang of the coster. ”

“ I know of no age or nation that has been without its slang, and the study is amongst the most curious that a scholar can take up; but our own age, after all, must be reckoned as the palmy time of slang, for we have gone beyond mere words, and our vulgarizations of language are significant of degradation of soul. ”

“ The other consists of new words and phrases, often vigorous and expressive, but not yet set down in the literary lexicon, and still on probation. In these two classes we find a justification for the existence of slang—for it is the function of slang to be a feeder of the vocabulary. Words get threadbare and dried up; they come to be like evaporated fruit, juiceless and tasteless. Now it is the duty of slang to provide substitutes for the good words and true which are worn out by hard service. And many of the recruits slang has enlisted are worthy of enrolment among the regulars. ”

“ Can we imagine a naturalist who would refuse to examine a viper, a bat, a scorpion, a scolopendra, or a tarantula, and throw them into the darkness, saying, "Fie, how ugly they are!" The thinker who turned away from slang would resemble a surgeon who turned away from an ulcer or a wart. He would be a philologist hesitating to examine a fact of language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact of humanity. For we must tell all those ignorant of the fact, that slang is at once a literary phenomenon and a social result. ”

“ For legitimate slang, far from being an unmitigated evil and a constant menace to the purity and propriety of our noble tongue, is standard English in the making, is idiom in the nascent state before it has attained to the dignity of correctness of usage. To change the [Pg 92] figure, legitimate slang is the recruiting ground whence come the new and untried words which are to take the place in the vernacular, of the archaic and obsolete words, dropping out of the ranks. ”

“ Few words among the many that go to make up the vocabulary of American slang have been in longer use and have a wider range than the word awful. From the loftiest and most awe-inspiring themes to the commonest trifle, this much-abused word has been employed. A correct speaker or writer almost fears to use the word lest he should suggest the idea of slang, and thus detract from the subject to which the word might most fitly be applied. ”

“ Using slang is just a habit, just a cheap and dopey trick; if you hump yourself and try to, you can shake it pretty quick. Watch my curves and imitate them, weigh your words before they're sprung, and in age you'll bless the habit that you formed when you were young. ”

“ When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society, one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside. One distinguishes questions and replies. One perceives, without understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents, but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang. ”

“ By slang, I mean the easy, natural, semi-technical language of special classes of society.
In English, as well as in most other languages, there are a great many terms and expressions which are chiefly used in certain trades and professions, and which are often unintelligible to outsiders. ”

“ The varieties of slang that have their origin and currency in the reputable classes of society owe their existence partly to impatience with the constraint of ceremonious propriety of speech, and partly to the kind of esprit de corps which leads those who are associated in any common pursuit, or whose mutual intercourse is especially intimate, to take pleasure in the possession of modes of speech that are peculiar to their own "set." ”

“ As thus defined, slang includes many varieties of speech, which are current respectively among different sections of the population. The one, however, which most perfectly answers to the definition, and may be regarded as the primary type, is the artificial jargon, partly cryptic and partly facetious, used by vagrants and professional thieves. It is true that the name of slang is now seldom applied to this jargon ”

“ A writer in Notes and Queries has well remarked that “the investigation of the origin and principles of cant and slang language opens a curious field of inquiry, replete with considerable interest to the philologist and the philosopher. It affords a remarkable instance of lingual contrivance, which, without the introduction of much arbitrary matter, has developed a system of communicating ideas, having all the advantages of a foreign language.” ”

“ America and England alike are too much given to slang and to clipping old words. Nothing in the speech of the former country, so far as I know, can match our ‘awfully nice,’ or our ‘what say?’ but one comfort is, that slang takes hundreds of years before it can creep into Standard English. ”

“ Current events, happenings of everyday life, often give rise to slang words, and these, after a time, come into such general use that they take their places in everyday speech like ordinary words and, as has been said, their users forget that they once were slang. ”

“ Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, are powerful words.... Much of America is shown in these and in newspaper names, and in names of characteristic amusements and games.... Our tongue is full of strong words, native or adopted, to express the blood-born passion of the race for rudeness and resistance, as against mere polish.... ”

“ But though it may be allowed to use some of these terms occasionally in familiar discourse, no one of any sense or good taste will ever think of indulging in slang language, either spoken or written. It is, no doubt, a bad sign of the times, and much to be deplored, that it is so common. Some writers have calculated that there are, at least, three thousand slang terms in common use. The above are but a few examples of this widespread corruption. ”

“ One need not invite slang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has been dropping its “s” and becoming language ever since the world began, and is certainly sometimes delightful and forcible beyond the reach of the dictionary. ”

“ Our British slang is all unmeaning stuff, you know; only consists in calling a thing by some short vulgar word—or some long and pompous word, the fun being in the pompousness; but the western slang is a sort of picture-writing, don't you know?—a kind of compressed metaphor, answering the purposes of an intellectual pemmican or charqui. Do you know what these things are, Miss Grey?"
"Oh, yes; compressed meats of some kind, I suppose. But I don't think I care about slang very much."
"You may be sure you will when you get over the defects of your Keeton bringing up. ”

“ A class of words that has a certain affinity with slang, though admitting of being clearly distinguished from it, consists of those which are proscribed from the intercourse of reputable society because they express too plainly ideas that are deemed indelicate, or because they are brutally insulting. Such words share with slang the characteristic that they are ordinarily employed only in intentional defiance of propriety; they differ from it in being really part of the original vernacular, and not of an artificial vocabulary which is substituted for it. ”

“ Whereas an Englishman's idea of slinging slang is to scoop up at random some inoffensive and well-meaning word that never did him any harm and apply it in the place of some other word, to which the first word is not related, even by marriage. ”

“ Of the two forms—sang and sung—for the imperfect tense of the verb to sing, the former—sang—is to be preferred.
Sit. See Set.
Slang. The slang that is heard among respectable people is made up of genuine words, to which an arbitrary meaning is given. It is always low, generally coarse, and not unfrequently foolish. With the exception of cant, there is nothing that is more to be shunned. We sometimes meet with persons of considerable culture who interlard their talk with slang expressions, but it is safe to assert that they are always persons of coarse natures. ”

“ Those who practise the slang soon obtain a considerable stock vocabulary, so that they converse rather from the memory than the understanding. Amongst the senior costermongers, and those who pride themselves on their proficiency in back slang, a conversation is [349] often sustained for a whole evening—that is, the chief words are in the back slang—especially if any “flats” are present whom they wish to astonish or confuse. ”

“ Technical and scientific terms may justly be stigmatized as slang when they are used pretentiously without any good reason, but not when they are chosen because, to those who understand them, they afford a clearer, more precise, or more convenient expression of the meaning than is found in the ordinary vocabulary. At the same time, it is true that every trade or profession has a real slang of its own; that is to say, a body of peculiar words and expressions that serve as flippant or undignified substitutes for the terms that are recognized as correct. ”

“ As a rule, slang words and phrases are, in the main, pointless and weak, for the simple reason that we use one word for every occasion when it happens to be the craze; and before long it comes to means nothing at all, even if it chanced to mean anything at the start—which it seldom does. ”

“ All slang is vulgar. It lowers the tone of society and the standard of thought. It is a great mistake to suppose that slang is in any manner witty. Only the very young or the uncultivated so consider it. ”

“ But slang is found in almost all classes of society. That of high life is drawn from various sources. One of its phases may be seen in the French words and forms which would-be fashionable people so delight in using. To call a breakfast a déjeuner is absurd, especially as we have a very good word of our own to express that meal. Leaders of fashion never speak of the fashionable world ”

“ Even more important than this third class of slang expressions is the fourth, containing the terms which are, so to speak, serving their apprenticeship, and as yet uncertain whether or not they will be admitted finally into the gild of good English. These terms are either useful or useless; they either satisfy a need or they do not; they therefore live or die according to the popular appreciation of their value. ”

“ It is written simply to call attention anew to the fact that slang is not to be absolutely condemned as the main source of corruption of our speech, as some assert, but that, contrariwise, it is an important factor in the growth of our vernacular and serves—at least, the best of it—a useful purpose in repairing the resulting waste which necessarily occurs in English as in every spoken language. ”