Word: slanging
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What kind of cockamamie lingo is slang anyway? Samuel Johnson railed against it, complaining about the corrupting influence on the English language of what in his day was called cant. Daniel Defoe hated it. Noah Webster, in his 1828 American Dictionary, defined slang as "low, vulgar, unmeaning." And in all the years since, legions of teachers have tried to eradicate...
Well, forget about it, Bubby. Slang may be substandard, the stepsister of Standard English, but it has enlivened the language for centuries. It is so deeply embedded in the daily life of Americans that no amount of bad-mouthing or mouthwashing by box-headed double-domes, drelbs, brainos and chuckleheads can give it the bum's rush. Though it does not belong in "correct" literary or conventional usage, except when employed for effect, it is wonderfully expressive and endlessly inventive...
...appreciation of slang's pungency that led Jonathan E. Lighter to begin collecting examples of street talk as a teenager. Now 45 and a research associate in the English department of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Lighter has launched the first of a planned three-volume Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang ($50), 1,080 pages teeming with more than 20,000 entries and etymologies, along with an illuminating survey. Volume I runs from a (as in a pig's a) through g (as in gytch, v., to steal); the second installment is due in 1996, the third...
...didn't work, and slang has gone garbonzo ever since. In the U.S. alone, thousands of vivid new words -- from the rude to the crude to the lewd -- have slipped into (some would say assaulted) the language. Most of the new vocabulary has come fromdiscrete groups for whom a special jargon affords status and protection: students (barf), blacks (jazz, originally to copulate), the military (blow it out your barracks bag), alcohol user (crocked), drug user (crackhead) and the underworld (grifter...
...feel like I care about who I am. I don't want to separate myself from other people who speak Spanish just because there are distinct political problems happening in the various countries that represent my origin or because there is a different dialect or slang in our common language. More and more I am feeling that to join one of these clubs would be to adhere to the belief that separation means identification, and I don't want to be identified that...