Cool words that live and die by the tongue

London

On the whole, students of language have 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.

So it’s brave of the researchers behind the latest edition of the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang to have declared that “slang has escaped its boundaries and is running wild”.

Once limited, it is said, to enclosed communities — such as prison, the Army and older state schools — it is now spreading throughout society.

Slang from family groups, immigrant communities and young people is being used much more widely than ever before.

Though the learnt professors of linguistics might shy away from it, we might feel that we all know what slang is.

It’s words that we ourselves would never use, or would only use ironically. Within our social groups, do we ever feel that 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”.

Confined to groups

But language confined to a small group of insiders is not always slang.

Doctors are talking slang to each other when they write on their 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 unfamiliar, Latin names.

So slang is not just the usage of an unfamiliar group, but part of an attempt to exclude the larger community by low or domestic usage.

If you ever started copying your teenage son’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.

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.

You may be looking at words it is difficult to believe anyone ever seriously used — it is hard to think that Victorian criminals really called shoes “crabshells” or a woman a “haybag”, as the dictionaries claim.

On the other hand, you may be looking at 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 into the language”.

John Ayto’s history of innovation in English vocabulary produces the first appearance of some words which not only seem quite ordinary, but also difficult to think of any functional alternative to — motor-bike (1903), talkie (1913), flapper (1921), pin-up (1941), flying saucer (1947), beatnik (1958), yuppie (1982), and podcasting (2004).

What, without the use of jocular 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? “Kidnap” was once jocular; “bike” a very casual abbreviation. Why did that survive, and “boneshaker” or “dandy-horse” fade into oblivion? Nobody knows.

Family source

The slang that spreads comes from any number of sources. Current research suggests that the kind used within families is increasingly spreading beyond their boundaries. This is only sometimes true, however.

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 cashpoint machine, the “blinkerty-blonk”. We have a word for food that is past its best but not inedible, or clothes that are a bit holed but OK for Saturday afternoons: we call them “minky”, a bit short of “manky”. Other families may bring words from an foreign or regional background, wherever they happen to be living.

A family with some Yorkshire blood may call the boys’ underpants their “kecks”, just as one with a Punjabi background may say “chuddies”.

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 in a stately way into the standard written language.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014