II.1 The Sources of Modern Slang
Slang is not the language of the underworld, nor does most of it necessarily come from the underworld. The main sources of slang change from period to period. Thus, in one period of American slang, frontiersmen, cowboys, hunters, and trappers may have been the main source; during some parts of the 1920s and '30s the speech of baseball players and criminals may have been the main source; at other times, the vocabulary of jazz musicians, soldiers, or college students may have been the main source [6].
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, sociology, engineering, and electronics tend to create true neologisms, often based on Greek or Latin roots, but these are not major sources for slang, though nurses and medical students adapt some medical terminology to their slang, and air force personnel and some other branches of the armed services borrow freely from engineering and electronics.
To the ordinary man, of average intelligence and middle-class position, slang comes from every direction, from above, from below, and from all sides, as well as from the center. What comes from some directions he will know for slang, what comes from others he may not. He may be expected to recognize words from below. Some of these are shortenings, by the lower classes of words, whose full form convey no clear meaning, and are therefore useless to them. There is a strong tendency to shorten everything that is possible. So the words: dinosaurs, armored, termination, graduate, technological, exhibition, exposition, doctor, fabulous, demonstration, criminal, homosexual turned into dino, armo, termo, grad, techno, exhibit, expo, doc, fab, demo, crim, homo. The word ecstasy developed intoxtc. This tendency of the substitution of the long words with the capital letters were established during 80’s by the rock-groups which used shortenings in the names of songs. So, abbreviation xyz means, examine your zipper.
Another set of words that may be said to come from below, since it owes its existence to the vast number of people who are incapable of appreciating fine shades of meaning, is exemplified by nice, awful, blooming. Words of this class fortunately never make their way, in their slang sense, into literature (except for dialogue). The abuse of nice has gone on at any rate for over the century. But even now we do not talk in books of a nice day, only of a nice distinction. On the other hand, the slang use makes us shy in different degrees of writing the words in their legitimate sense: a nice distinction, we write almost without qualms; an awful storm we think twice about; and as to a blooming girl, we hardly venture it nowadays. The most recent sufferer of this sort is perhaps chronic. It has been adopted by the masses, as far apart at least as in Yorkshire and in London, for a mere people who know better, after which it may be expected to succeed awful [8].
So much for the slang from below; the ordinary man can detect it. He is not so infallible about what comes to him above. It is safe to say that the half-dozen words are all at present enjoying some vogue as slang and that they all come from regions that to most of are overhead. Phenomenal is from metaphysics, epoch-making is from the Philosophic Historian, true inwardness is from Literary Criticism, cad is from the Upper Classes. Among these the one that will be most generally allowed to be slang-cad- is in fact the least so; it has by this time, like mob, passed its probation and taken its place as an orthodox word, so that all who do not find adequate expression for their feelings in the orthodox have turned away to bounder and other forms that still admit to emphasis of quotation marks. As for the rest of them, they are being subjected to that use, at once over-frequent and inaccurate, which produces one kind of slang. But the average man, seeing from what exalted quarters they come is dazzled into admiration and hardly knows them for what they are.
By the slang that comes from different sides or from the center we mean especially the many words taken originally from particular professions, pursuit, or games, but extended beyond them. Among these a man is naturally less critical of what comes from his own daily concerns, that is, in his view, from the center. People whose conversation runs much upon a limited subject feel the need of new phrases for the too familiar things.
Show-business workers, although they have largely shed the raffish image of their roving and carnival past, are still a fertile source of slang. Some sources of the slang are entirely or relatively new. Examples of this are the computer milieu and the hospital-medical-nursing complex. In the first case and exciting technological inundation is at the base, and in the other, as in so many other trends of our era, the reason is television [10].
Sports also make a much larger contribution, with football and even basketball not challenging but beginning to match baseball as prime producer.
World Wars I and II probably gave us general slang than any other events in history.
Railroad slang has been replaced though on a lesser scale, by the usage of airline workers and truck drivers. The jazz world, formerly so richly involved with drug use, prostitution, booze and gutter life, is no longer so contributory, nor has rock and roll quite made up the loss, but taken as a whole, popular music - rock, blues, funk, rap - are making inroads.
Youth slang derives some of its power from its willingness to borrow from other bodies of slang. Despite its seeming mandate of creativity and originality, slang is blatantly predatory, borrowing without shame from possible sources. Foremost among them is the African-American vernacular, whose influence on American youth slang of the 20th century cannot be over-stated. Beginning in the late 1930s with the wild popularity of swing jazz and the jitterbug, continuing into the “jive generation” that fought World War II, through the beats and hipsters of the 1950s, the Sixties’ mainstream youth and hippies alike, into the pervasive patois of hip-hop, American youth slang has borrowed consistently and generously from the slang of the black American urban experience.
In the 1930s, mainstream youth eager to embrace the language of their jazz-musician idols pored over Cab Calloway’s “hiptionaries,” jive glossaries for the uninitiated. In the 1950s and 1960s, the slang of American teenagers was shaped in large part by fast-talking AM radio disk jockeys, who drew upon the black urban vernacular for their vocabulary, syntax, pacing and soul — “Come on South Philly. Come on, come on, West Philly, come on South Jersey, come on, yon teenagers everywhere. Hit that thing now. Hey, hey, ho, ho. Let me say greetings and salutations…” the disc jockeys would shout. In the 1980s, hip-sounding video-jockeys on MTV joined the ranks of slang instructors; their language was also heavily influenced by the African-American street. For the last two years, the black slang of hip-hop culture and rap music has dominated American youth slang among all classes, whether or not they embrace the actual rap music and the hip-hop ethic. Another source for youth slang is, surprisingly, the slang graveyard of generations past. When teenagers in the mid-1960s jumped onto groovy and boss as primary adjectives of strong approval, they were simply recycling rejects — from the 1940s in the case of groovy and the 1870s in the case of boss. When the youth of the seventies embraced sweet as their adjective of praise, they unknowingly harkened back to teenage slang of the 1930s. Similarly, the appropriation of fly as a prime piece of the vocabulary of hip-hop and rap in the 1980s was no more than a salvage operation from the slang of jazz musicians of the 1930’s, which in turn drew from the 1870s [11].
Whatever its source, youth slang is a core element of youth culture, as a defiant gesture of resistance and an emblem of tribe identity. Fashion and hair styles are other key manifestations of a generation’s identity, but they can be easily regulated by adult authorities. With music and language, regulation and restriction are much more difficult. Even the most vigilant and repressive attempts by adult authority cannot completely eradicate slang and music with its slang lyrics. Language can be scrutinized and controlled in some places at some times, but it defies universal regulation, which allows its subversive nature to prevail.
As we move into our twenties, we gradually stop acquiring new slang and then ultimately just stop; we also slowly stop using our existing slang vocabulary. For most of our adult lives, we use the core slang vocabulary acquired in our youth either as a lingering symbol of our generational identity or simply on a vestigial basis. When we think of slang, then, we either think of our children’s slang or the slang of our own youth. For this reason, if no other, the slang of youth exerts enormous power over American English. Of the entire vernacular, slang is the most spectacular. Slang swings. Slang moves and grooves. Slang rocks, slang rules.