Slang: Language with its Dukes Up.Jun 16 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line I've taken to publishing school work. This was for my linguistics class.
First: what is slang? Put simply, it’s colloquial (or common, low), language. It is language that is “unsavory” to the grammatical pundits. Bill Watterson once described his comic creation, Calvin, as someone who,“ Is fun on paper, but I wouldn’t trust him in my house.“(Watterson 12) That’s slang for most academics. Keep it to the streets. Don’t let it within my sanctum of Latin-originated verbiage and hoity-toity phrasery, to track muck on the carpets, rifle through my lovingly-alphabetized stacks of American Scientific Journal and un-dogear the pages. A taboo word sits on the tongue like a tiger, or paces through the jungle of the brain a profane prowl. At least, that’s the textbook definition. In reality, slang is anything but low. It is emblematic of the ardency that people of all races, hue, tongue, hold for language. It is creative. It is fiery, salty, mouthy, chin-juttingly, in-your-phiz acerbic. There are, in my extensive research into the subject, many aspects of slang that have gone unregarded by the long-haireds over the years: the variety it adds to the language, imagination, its being representative of humankind’s integration of myriad languages into a harmony. These all shall be analyzed, as well as some intrinsic characteristics of slang. I think it is also important to name Esther and Albert E. Lewin’s The Thesaurus of Slang as my primary source, and heartily laud it as an indispensable tool for the word ardent (although not the biggest slang resource out there. That plum goes to The Historical Dictionary of Slang, a four-volume mega-lexicon that, while not allowing the reader to be able to select from among a range of synonyms, is full of many phrases and words sure to jazz lingo mavens. And it also shows the extent of slang’s heft and infiltration into our core language, as the volumes lumped together are almost one-third of the size of the Oxford English Dictionary.) If you were going to meet a friend at East Side Mario’s, and wanted to know what the time was, would you check your tick-tock, chronicker, tattler, ticker, turnip, timepiece, or Big Ben? And as you went into the restaurant, would the host check your car coat, Benny, binny, Benjamin, horse blanket, threads, flogger, lead sheet, or orchestration? And as you sat down with your friend, would you order a wimpy, clean-up-the-kitchen, ground round (hamburger), ball, geedunk, black cow (various flavors and forms of ice cream), and top it all off with a frothy, thick soda back, seltzer, cooler (various ways of having and taking soda water)? The point of this exercise in redundancy was not to flaunt my storehouse (or is that magasin?) of slang terms. That was done to show that slang adds variety to our language. If one were to speak in plain, easily-understood syllables, conversations would not be much worth having. Who wants to hear,” There was an accident. It was scary,” when one could hear: “There was a crack ‘em up, and it was hairy.” You may raise some brows with the latter, but at least you will get more of a response than you would with the former, yawner statement. England was rocked four years back by first-time big screen director, Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. In it the audience is fusilladed with every form of cockney slang available, from “bollocks”, to “jacobs”, to “ping-pong tittly”. Would you prefer the attention-gloming sentence,” Don’t take the pi!!, Boris,” or “Don’t cause trouble for me any more, or I shall be greatly motivated to inflict serious pain on you.” The obvious choice is the first. It is creative, associating excretion with extreme pain. It is effective. We all can intuit from the sound of those words that the speaker is holding a magnum. He is. Which he unloads, as well as some more comic, jivey lingo. Recently-deceased film critic Pauline Kael stirred up such a loathing for herself and her reviews while she was alive. One of the reasons was her incessant wisecracking. Another was that, even though she wrote for The New Yorker, that revered, time-honored Ritz rag, she refused to bend to the wishes of the tremulous, blood-fearing editor-in-chief and strike out her numerous slangisms. Quoting someone quoting someone, she refused to augment,” The world is wired to Harry Connick’s a!!”, with the less-lurid “derriere” She refused, won. And she had good reason to refuse. If she had given in, it would have compromised the entire intent of the quote, to startle. She refused to take out the potentially-anger-rousing phrase because Kael knew that slang has its place. Slang is words, to quote one reviewer, with “sleeves rolled up.” The purpose of a critic is, to quote Almost Famous, to be “honest and unmerciful.” One cannot fully achieve such an end when one is using phrases such as,” I am loath to give even a modicum of appreciation for this anti-philharmonic bit of musical foppery.” A slangified phrasing is less verbose, more powerful. It should be noted that the current reviewers for The New Yorker (Anthony Lane and David Denby), do mix the occasional bleep word in with their usually heavily-noetic prose. Such prominent poets as William Wordsworth recognized the power of the common phrase. Wordsworth is often honored as one of the pioneers in Albionic verse to move away from the lofty, and down into the more glitzy. Nowadays, thanks to his future-paving prosody, one may appreciate slang-spiked poetry such as Sylvia Plath’s Daddy, which employs such “improperisms” as “achoo...scraped... gobbledygoo...squeak.” Another important characteristic of slang is its creativity. Slang is inherently descriptive, often employing synecdoche (when a part speaks for the whole, or vice versa). For instance, a person who shakes hands a lot (thus a schmoozer, an ingratiator, as a politician may be), may be termed a mitt-glomer. Mitt being slang for hand, glom for “to take hold of.” Thus, the action is used to describe the person. A prison attorney may be termed a “dumpster”, as they are literally rooting around in the hashhole of human filth to make money, to stir up cases. A “lip-splitter”, or “bag-puncher” is a prize fighter, because that is exactly what he does. Such slang takes the most poignant, the most piquing aspect of an object and uses it to identify the object. And it is as grammar-defyingly tongue-torqueing as one may imagine. Check out this entry under “mistake“: etaoin shrdlu. Can you pronounce it? Of course not. It lacks sufficient vowelage to be pronounceable by a human tongue. One would need a corkscrew tongue to manage it. But that that word exists, that somebody out there actually had the audacity to concoct such a boggler word shows that slangers take the constituents of language and try to break them for the purpose of introducing freshness to the language. I can guarantee that you’ll never forget the word etaoin shrdlu. I came across it only once, six months ago, and it has remained stickumed in my cerebellum. Also, there is such wit in slang, completely absent from ivory towerisms. Pedantic wit is, for example, a word such as pandemonium, a Milton-coined word that takes the phrase “all-gods”, and makes it pan = all, demon = demon - ium, or “all-demons.” Interesting, in an analytical, chalk-dry sort of way. But what about slang terms such as “rent-a-judge”, for moderator, or “old muddy”, for the Mississippi River? Tell me your lips didn’t perk a bit at that. How about Alaskan state bird for mosquito, as Alaska, surprisingly, suffers from such horrible summer infestations of mosquitoes, that people and beasts-of-burden have been known to have been sucked dry? People don’t get along when they are together. They fight, bicker, quibble, niggle. But their words do not. One of the greatest things about slang is its incorporation, its assimilation of many, many languages into a homogenized whole. I can look through my copy of the revised one hundred and eighty-six thousand plus word The Thesaurus of Slang, and select any significant block of words and know that I shall find at least three words borrowed from another tongue. How about “loco”, the Spanish word for crazy? How about “hombre?” Again, Spanish. It means man. And I’ll show you how well-integrated alien slang is into our idiom. My spell-checker has been red-underlining just about every slang phrase I have put down so far, judging them aberrations, but it has left the two, just-named slang terms unmolested. And let’s not forget the African American contribution to slang. Lewin, in his Preface to the First Edition, names blacks as a massive contributor to our slang. And, aside from the British, who gave us most of our slang (a good seventy-five percent, I’d estimate, as is indicative by on-line British slang thesauri), blacks have given us the greatest amount of slang. And some of the most novel. All through my slang thesaurus I see little pepperings of (Af. Am.), the thesaurus’s acknowledgement of a black phrase. Such phrases as “large and in charge”, and “jammy” (a kind of gun), entered in from that lingo-loving minority. Also important, slang reminds us of our heritage. You have to realize, most of our slang, as was previously-stated, comes from Britain, our mammyland. Words such as “cool”, and “psyche”, and “lorry”, and the previously-mentioned ballocks, these all have pussyfooted their way into our mental lexicon. We as Americans have a tendency to credit ourselves as the end-all and be-all of everything. We are a superpower. We are massive, impenetrable, seemingly. Although we now regard such hubris with rueful sad-smirks. But we have to remember, that even our tongue is on loan from Limey Land. We have a come-from place, an origin. We issued from somewhere. And people say that slang-employers are not well-read, or knowledgeable. Well, how does one explain the term “Pearl Harbor” in reference to the infamous sneak attack, which, literally, in context, means sneak attack. What about “Walter Mitty”, borrowed from Thurberian pages, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, to mean a day-dreamer? A smock is a Mother Hubbard, and someone must know something about Alice in Wonderland to have conjured up the phrase “grin like a Cheshire cat.” And slang is highly onomatopoeic, with phrases such as “crash”, for a collision, or “buzz, urp, kachoo”, and others. This demonstrates that slangsters have managed to do something that more ostentatious writing finds nearly impossible, make the meaning of the word be in consonance with the sound. The sound indicates the denotation, a bit at least. Let’s see if you can get that from pachyderm, or unctuous. And slang has been around, probably, longer than more higher-up tongueages. Remember, trogladytes spoke in grunts and growls before they learned to forge words. Grrrr sounds much more like glitch, or rowr like ragtag, then like gorgonize, or rubescent. That shows that slang, perhaps, harkens back to our more primordial selves. Not only that, slang is fun. Describing a hogsty household as being clustered with “towers of trash”, I decided to add on the minted word “scuzzscraper”, homogenizing scuzz, or grime, with skyscraper. I also did gut-dimple for navel, nettle-wire and bramblewire for razor wire, and vroombuggy for a fast car. Give it a try. Or, rather, make a run at it. Works Cited Watterson, Bill. A Twelfth Year Calvin & Hobbes Anthology. New York, NY, MacMillan Publishing Co., 1998. Kael, Pauline. Taking it all In. Houghton Mifflin. New York, NY, 1995. Lurie, Alison. New York Times, Issue Fourteen Ninety-Five. New York, NY, 2000. Crowe, Cameron. Almost Famous. Paramount Pictures, Hollywood, CA, 2000. Wordworth, William. Adventures in English Literature. Heritage Ed. Edited, New York, NY, 1995. Plath, Sylvia, Daddy, Norton Publishing Co., New York, NY, 1992.  |
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