How slang rocks up
STUDENTS of language have mostly stayed away from the study of slang. Not because it’s not interesting, but because it’s so hard to say what, exactly, it is. But the researchers behind the latest Dictionary of Contemporary Slang have declared that “slang has escaped its boundaries and is running wild”. Once limited to enclosed communities — prisons, armies and schools — it is spreading throughout society. Slang from family groups, immigrant communities and young people is being used more widely.
We might feel that we know what slang is. It is words that we ourselves would never use, or would only use ironically. Within our social groups, do we ever feel we are speaking in slang? That’s a realisation we come to when we leave our regiment, for instance, and find that outsiders have no idea what we mean by an “admin vortex”, “gopping” or “fubar”.
But language confined to a small group of insiders is not always slang. Doctors are using slang with each other when they write on notes, as they used to, “TEETH” or “CTD” (“Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy” and “Circling The Drain” for the moribund). Not so much when they refer to diseases by their Latin names.
So slang is not just the usage of an unfamiliar group, but also part of an attempt to exclude the larger community. If you ever started copying your teen’s use of “peng”, “butters” or “piff ”, he would inevitably drop it in favour of something more abstruse (since “cool” and “wicked” seem now to be beneath derision).
What’s interesting, however, is what happens when a word stops being cool within a small group: it can either disappear entirely, or simply move into the language. Polari, the coded slang of gay men from the 1950s, is now barely understood even by most gay men. Yet slang did supply the English language with the word “naff ”, just as Lewis Carroll’s coinages in Jabberwocky supplied the now perfectly ordinary word “chortle”.
This dual path, either into obscurity or the unremarkable, gives the study of historical slang a bizarre quality. Some are words it is difficult to believe anyone ever used. Did Victorian criminals really call shoes “crabshells” or a woman a “haybag”?
Then there are words it is impossible to imagine anyone using racily. Dr Johnson thought “shabby” was “a low word that has crept into conversation … but ought not to be admitted”.
John Ayto’s Oxford Dictionary of Slang reveals the first appearances of words that are now quite ordinary: motorbike (1903), flapper (1921), pin-up (1941), flying saucer (1947), yuppie (1982) and podcasting (2004).
What, without the use of slang, would we have to refer to a “skyscraper” — tried out to describe men, sails, horses and hats before settling on a tall building as its meaning in the 1880s?
The slang that spreads comes from any number of sources. Current research suggests that the kind used within families is increasingly spreading. In our family, we have a name for the remote control — we call it the “zapper”, as many others do — and also a name for the ATM, the “blinkerty-blonk”.
Only a prig would decry slang altogether. It’s the creative centre of language, where terms are tried out, words are ventured, and disappear, catch on briefly or advance into the standard written language.
At one end is Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) in Mean Girls, trying to turn “fetch” i nto a synonym for “fashionable”. She is finally told “Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” At the other is a word like “mob”, once the coolest of the cool, decried by dictionary-makers, and now just the word for the thing.
Slang is exciting, unknowable and mostly here just for the moment. So try a new term today. In 10 years, it will be gibberish, or sweetly quaint, or just an ordinary expression. — Philip Hensher © The Daily Telegraph, London