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Dec 16, 2022 · slang. (n.). 1756, "special vocabulary of tramps or thieves" or any set of persons of low character, later "jargon of a particular profession" (1801). The sense of "very informal language characterized by vividness and novelty" is by 1818.
- 한국어 (Korean)
slang 뜻: 속어; 1756년, "유목민이나 도둑 등의 특수 어휘" 또는 낮은 신분의 일부인 사람들의...
- Slangy
A mere vulgarism is not slang, except when it is purposely...
- Slalom
combined clay-pigeon shooting, fly-fishing, and...
- Slantways
1650s, "an oblique direction or plane" (originally of...
- 한국어 (Korean)
- Overview
- Development of slang
- Creators of slang
- Sources
- Linguistic processes forming slang
slang, unconventional words or phrases that express either something new or something old in a new way. It is flippant, irreverent, indecorous; it may be indecent or obscene. Its colourful metaphors are generally directed at respectability, and it is this succinct, sometimes witty, frequently impertinent social criticism that gives slang its characteristic flavour. Slang, then, includes not just words but words used in a special way in a certain social context. The origin of the word slang itself is obscure; it first appeared in print around 1800, applied to the speech of disreputable and criminal classes in London. The term, however, was probably used much earlier.
Other related types of nonstandard word usage include cant and jargon, synonyms for vague and high-sounding or technical and esoteric language not immediately intelligible to the uninitiate. In England, the term cant still indicates the specialized speech of criminals, which, in the United States, is more often called argot. The term dialect refers to language characteristic of a certain geographic area or social class.
Slang emanates from conflicts in values, sometimes superficial, often fundamental. When an individual applies language in a new way to express hostility, ridicule, or contempt, often with sharp wit, he may be creating slang, but the new expression will perish unless it is picked up by others. If the speaker is a member of a group that finds that hi...
Civilized society tends to divide into a dominant culture and various subcultures that flourish within the dominant framework. The subcultures show specialized linguistic phenomena, varying widely in form and content, that depend on the nature of the groups and their relation to each other and to the dominant culture. The shock value of slang stems largely from the verbal transfer of the values of a subculture to diametrically opposed values in the dominant culture. Names such as fuzz, pig, fink, bull, and dick for policemen were not created by officers of the law. (The humorous “dickless tracy,” however, meaning a policewoman, was coined by male policemen.)
Britannica Quiz
Slang Through the Ages Vocabulary Quiz
Occupational groups are legion, and while in most respects they identify with the dominant culture, there is just enough social and linguistic hostility to maintain group solidarity. Terms such as scab, strike-breaker, company-man, and goon were highly charged words in the era in which labour began to organize in the United States; they are not used lightly even today, though they have been taken into the standard language.
In addition to occupational and professional groups, there are many other types of subcultures that supply slang. These include sexual deviants, narcotic addicts, ghetto groups, institutional populations, agricultural subsocieties, political organizations, the armed forces, Gypsies, and sports groups of many varieties. Some of the most fruitful sources of slang are the subcultures of professional criminals who have migrated to the New World since the 16th century. Old-time thieves still humorously refer to themselves as FFV—First Families of Virginia.
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Most subcultures tend to draw words and phrases from the contiguous language (rather than creating many new words) and to give these established terms new and special meanings; some borrowings from foreign languages, including the American Indian tongues, are traditional. The more learned occupations or professions like medicine, law, psychology, s...
The processes by which words become slang are the same as those by which other words in the language change their form or meaning or both. Some of these are the employment of metaphor, simile, folk etymology, distortion of sounds in words, generalization, specialization, clipping, the use of acronyms, elevation and degeneration, metonymy, synecdoch...
The most attractive of the unproven possibilities discussed in our revised etymology was first advanced in the 1860s by the philologist Isaac Taylor, who suggested that slang vocabulary had taken its name from a regional word for any narrow strip of land or especially waste ground (OED’s slang n.³), with this name for the fields and roadside verges on which hawkers and other itinerants ...
Oct 10, 2022 · 10 October 2022 Despite one noted etymologist claiming that the origin of the term slang “is known!” (exclamation point in the original), the origin of the term is not. Like so many slang words, the word slang itself does not have a known origin. And the issue with slang is not just the etym
It is often difficult to collect etymologies for slang terms, largely because slang is a phenomenon of speech, rather than written language and etymologies which are typically traced via corpus. Eric Partridge , cited as the first to report on the phenomenon of slang in a systematic and linguistic way, postulated that a term would likely be in circulation for a decade before it would be ...
slang, adj. & adv. meanings, etymology, pronunciation and more in the Oxford English Dictionary
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The exact etymology of the word ‘slang’ is unknown. ‘“Slang”: the word’ divides the possible origins and various theories behind the meaning of the term into three groups: (1) Romani; (2) Scandinavian; (3) variations on SE language or lingo or French langue. The shift in slang’s primary meaning of ‘vagrant jargon’ to ‘vulgar ...
