Slang!

Slang is vocabulary that is not standard, and it is usually extremely informal. Slang words are often used because they’re funny and lively. If you look up a slang word in the dictionary, you will often find that it is has a different definition to the one you were expecting. For instance, let’s look at the word ‘bitch’. If someone called you a bitch and you had no idea what it meant, you might look it up in the dictionary. The dictionaries definition of ‘bitch’ is ‘a female canine (oxford, 2009)’. This might not match your expectations of the word in the context it was used! In slang terms ‘bitch’ can mean a couple of things. First, that you’re an unpleasant and unkind sort of person. Second, it means a complaint, or anything difficult. Obviously, the definitions can illicit different responses and sometimes cause a few problems.

How do we get slang words in the first place? Words aren’t magically slang over night, and there is a process involved. Sometimes a word starts out being popular in a smaller group, such as in certain age or ethnic ranges. This word can then either stay within those boundaries, or it can spread out and become mainstream. In many cases, the word will be used so much that it becomes standard, but sometimes it will simply remain a slang term. For example, the words ‘moving pictures’ were used within a small group of people that liked to go to the movie theatre. These people shortened the word ‘moving pictures’ to ‘movies’ for convenience. As the moving pictures became popular the word ‘movies’ spread and became more mainstream. Today the word ‘movie’ is not slang, and in the dictionary it is defined as a ‘motion picture (dictionary.com)’There are many other instances when words that used to be slang become mainstream, for example, the word ‘okay’, and the word ‘mob’, which came from the latin word ‘mobile vulgas’.

Mr. Gilbert Chesterton stated “All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry,” which is one of the popular viewpoints of slang words. Another viewpoint is that slang words are an unfortunate butchering of the English language. I personally think it depends on which words are being analyzed. Either way, it’s interesting to see which words passed the test and became standard and which ones did not. We’ll have to wait and see if the word ‘bitch’ ends up having more than one standard definition in the future!