Slang

Shut yer gob and gimme a fag!

I believe this could be a quite wide ranging discussion as there is a lot of territory we could cover. Perhaps if we set out our particular interests in this area first, it might help structure the discussion.

My interests in slang revolve around the following areas:

1. British slang
2. slang used by minorities or outsiders
3. historical slang
4. big picture theories as to how and why slang is used

Here is a site with a useful introduction to slang, a dictionary, and links to specialist and location specific slang sites:

http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/index.htm

(I have emailed the owner re any use we might want to make of this site - as it has a rider re copyright).

I have also invited resident LT expert, abecedary to this discussion. Not sure that he normally contributes to groups so will have to wait and see. He has a splendid LT library by the way - well worth visiting.

I'll share some surfer slang eventually. I can at least do that much here in this group.

I think "Slang in Literature" could be an interesting study/discussion as well.

Obvious starting points: the invented slang of A Clockwork Orange and Riddley Walker, or the kind of dialect/slang Irvine Welsh re-created in Trainspotting; those works come immediately to mind, I'm sure there's lots more examples.

Go piss uppa rope.

a useful word
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0od7spyth_I&feature=related

Tom Wolfe does more with this word in his recent novel about university life.

Kind of an example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1ihZ5xJSNw&feature=related

www.urbandictionary.com

Riddley Walker and Trainspotting may be my two favourite books in the English language, and A Clockwork Orange is not far behind.

How does slang differ from colloquial speech? From argot, cant, and jargon? From vulgarisms?

Robert

So there is in fact a slang thread! Why didn't you say so, tomcat? Though the following is more in line with accents, from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which is where (I was told) youse, as in "youse guys," originally came from, along with the name of the neighborhood itself, Greenpernt (to the old locals, who have mainly been replaced by Polish immigrants and newscale hipsters). Also the neighborhood where Marlon Brando told his brother in On the Waterfront, "I coulda been a contenda."

Anyway, I'd lived there for three years or so and was walking down the street behind two older Irish guys who were palavering about "Lama Street." Lama this and Lama that. I like to wander, to look for holes-in-the-wall and cheap restaurants, and I'd never seen this "Lama Street." And then these guys turned the corner and I looked up and saw the street sign: Lorimer. They'd cut three syllables down to two and gotten rid of the R. Brooklyn concision.

Not that I knew what a lorimer was either. I had to study British to figure that out.

Some prison slang from my experience there - well as a researcher - it was a male prison, medium security

drop a dime - snitch on someone. The dime may refer to when pay telephones were a dime, but in this case it would result in Administrative Detention of up to 10 days while whatever was charged was investigated.

kicking it - discussing something

the po-leese - the guards, but sometimes inmates would tell me that they thought of me as the poleese also (no offense, they'd usually say), or that they didn't

shank - homemade knife
hootch - homemade liquor
house - cell

zenomax #3: In my guise as a copyeditor often called upon to "unanglicize" texts for American readers, I've been using a book called British English, A to Zed by Norman W. Schur. But more often than not I can't find the British slang I'm looking for, partially because the book is quite disorganized. (It's also a relatively old.) Hopefully, your link (http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/index.htm) will prove fruitful. Thanks.

Peter - I'm not aware of any current, comprehensive published source on British slang. This book:

http://www.librarything.com/work/5102898

is a good source of historical slang, and one of my favourite 'dipping in' books.

In general, anything by Eric Partridge provides a good insight into the (sometimes obscure, or extinct ) byways of the english language.

The other part of slang which strikes me is that it contains both a historical body of words and insights into specific worlds (in the UK alone we can look at cant, parlary, eton slang, Glaswegian working class argot, and, no doubt, pre mechanised agrarian slang); and also a living, ever changing organic vehicle, adopted in turn by each generation and made its own.

~1 & 5: tcM and P. - a fancy has formed in my head that these are, respectively, each your particular cathphrases - and probably the words you each utter when first you wake (and maybe the last words you utter before falling into repose).

Zounds, like Zeno's parra duks!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMAGwMAXTpU

u2zeno
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHy_XeBMagU&feature=related

>14 zenomax: Mwahahah!

(Actually, Zeno, it's the first remark I make after coitus, but this is STRICTLY between you and me.)

I'm sorry to come late to this thread. I have been somewhat occupied with the Vagrants and Vagabonds.

Copyedit, I started this thread especially in your honour, sir, after reading about your desire to discuss the topic. Unlike that uncouth dictator Enreeeeque in the other salon, in this one we aim to please - democracy is simply adorable! Another herring?

Enreeeeeque, Porious and Martin, I am starting a separate thread for slang in literature so that we can keep this one focussed on the linguistic angle. I think both topics deserve a deeper look.

Zeno seems to be running with the ball at the moment, which is marvellous to behold and thoroughly stimmilating. solla, I'm very intrigued to learn more prison slang. Prison slang is a big feature of the language of Genet, one of my saints. How fascinating that they call a cell a house!
And Mr Durick, what in your opinion is the difference between slang and argot?

I am intrigued about one thing: British slang. As a Brit myself (Murr blushes modestly into his tail), I have no idea what you are talking about. I have never heard of this before, never seen it before. What is this strange beast.

In my honor? Why, thanks. Not that I have a lot to say about slang, except maybe outasite, far out, groovy, heavy (man), and, from the more distant past, "Denks a lot."

When I visited Australia a few years ago, I came away with a new appreciation for slang. The Aussies have taken it to new heights (or lows) mainly by shortening nearly every word. I read Peter Temple's The Broken Shore last year, and it would have been unintelligible without the glossary. Some favorites: Macca's:McDonald's, arvo:afternoon, sangers:sandwiches, panelbeater: auto bodyshop worker and stickybeak:inquisitive person.

Again, this is more about accents than slang. It's hard to know what thread to go to, tomcat. You're creating an empire to rival Enrique's, and just as confusing.

Among the foolish things I pride myself on is my Brooklyn accent, though I've probably lost most of it after living for years in Berkeley and now in upstate New York. But years ago, when I was a mailman in Oakland, California, I was humbled by the guys from New Joizy who worked there. (Take note, Alex Austin.) I could barely understand them; they sounded like they were from an uber-Brooklyn.

>19 ReadStreetDave: haha! brings back my heady youth when I was doing a Kerouac round Oz

Let Stalk Strine

http://www.amazon.com/Strine-Stalk-Nose-Tone-Unturned/dp/0725406011

Copyedit, another glass of vodka, and a few more herring will soon give you the hang of things. and As for that Enrrrrrrique, Pha! sir, Pah!@

J'ADORE le Broooklyn Slang. please do let rip with some more examples.

Well, okay. Here's a joke. One of two or three that I know. (I forget them almost as soon as I hear them.)

Q: What's the Brooklyn alphabet?

A: Fucken A, fucken B, fucken C ...

>21 tomcatMurr:, 22 Isn't there a saying that Brooklyn is the place where they pronounce oil, earl and earl, oil?

That sounds right (to me, at any rate). It's also the place about which Thomas Wolfe said, "Only the dead know Brooklyn." But it's only when I go to the Bronx (it's the Bronx because the Broncks were the big landowners up there, back in Dutch times, so you went to the Broncks') that I get hopelessly lost. (Though people from Breuklein prob'ly say da Bronx.)

And one more localism: I was a boy in Canarsie, a neighborhood so far from any other that it became a synonym for being beyond the Pale (more on the actual Pale another time, if tomcat creates a thread on the origin of cliches). In California you'd say "stuck in Lodi." In New York City, you'd be from Canarsie; which, by the way, was the Indian tribe that sold Manhattan to the Dutch. I wonder if they even owned it?

I used to know an Italian who said the first thing he did every morning was "hang a Dutchman" whatever could he have meant. Surely not what I am thinking. 3 of my nieces are 1/2 Dutch.

Here in the Hudson Valley there are a lot of Dutch names, though Kingston, the nearest agglomeration of people jokingly called a city, changed its name from Wiltwyck after the British burned it to the ground during the American Revolution. We have a Rip Van Winkle Bridge and a lot of streams and creeks ending in the suffix kill. Ganeshaka, for instance, grew up across the road from the Sawkill. Though you people who live in the Southwest would of course call our streams "rivers."

>26 copyedit52:

The Dutch influence in the US happens to be the subject of a book I've been reading last week:
Yankees, cookies en dollars.
There appears to be an English translation: Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops.
Though 'kil' is now rather unusual in Dutch, there are a few streams still called that way, notably the 'Dordtse kil'

#23, That's Earl, brother.

Today's factoid from New York State. (God knows what thread I'm supposed to be on.) The reason the western N.Y. state city is called "Buffalo" is because the English who settled there could not wrap their heads around the extant name, which was French: Belle Fleuve (Beautiful River), which I suppose was the Niagara River, connecting Lakes Ontario and Erie.

#17, Murr, by British slang I mean the various strands of slang extant in the British Isles. I wasn't putting forward the claim that there was any esoteric argot called 'British slang'. Any confusion is regretted.

Now, as to what encompasses slang in the english language (I would love to get input from others on slang in other languages), The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang points to 3 types of slang:

1. From mid 18th century, 'the special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low and disreputable character' - a strand which continues in the specialist coded languages of the drug world and gang cultures

2. from late 18th century, slang came to include: 'the special vocabulary or phraseology of a particular calling or profession': printers' slang, costermongers' slang, even the slang vocabulary of doctors and lawyers.'

3.from the early 19th century, slang was applied much more generally to any 'language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some new special sense'.

All 3 strands continue to this day. Slang serves as a private vocabulary - if you can speak it you are included if you do not you are on the outer.

I like the idea of a language operating 'below the level of standard educated speech'.

An interesting dictionary of historical slang can be found free to download here:

http://www.archive.org/details/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft

In this dictionary we find that a 'Cacafuego' is a 'shite-fire'; whilst a 'Chit' is actually a 'Dandy-prat'.

Momentous events where a group of people is thrown together also spawns a rich heritage of slang and colloquialism.

WW1 slang still had meaning in everyday life in the 1960s and 70s although I guess it recedes fast as that generation passes.

>32 zenomax: Ditto for WWII phrases. Remember "Kilroy was here"? I bet that if you polled 1,000 people under 30, only a handful would have heard of it. (I didn't live through the war, but my parents did, so I'm somewhat familiar with the era.)

Now you're cooking with gas!

somewhere around our house is a dictionary of Australian slang, circa 1942 - written, if i recall, primarily for the benefit of American and English soldiers.

Cut the Cake!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pTrGVkkzkQ&feature=related

Thoroughly amusing and informative thread.

Zeno, I'm curious about 2 in your definitions above. How would this differ from jargon? or are slang and jargon and argot merely synonyms of each other?

>34 copyedit52: Ha ha. I try to eliminate as much linguistic prejudice from myself as I can, but that expression will always make me cringe. It makes me think of dickish old granduncles who snap at you when you can't figure out how to chop wood properly, and then they think they were too harsh and when you finally start getting it they try to make amends with this patronizing and non-carbon neutral phrase.

I'm not sure this question belongs on this thread (of course), because I'm not sure it's slang (maybe I should go over to the translation conversation) or whether it's just French that I don't know. To whit: Years ago someone laid a French phrase on me (perhaps slang, perhaps not) that I should have written down and didn't, and I've been looking for it ever since. It means something like: attraction to, or affection for, settings in which things are falling apart; like funky old northeastern cities, or neighborhoods within cities, that most people prefer to shun and which I have a great (and perhaps perverse) affection for. Can anyone help me on this?

#33, "Remember "Kilroy was here"?"

When I lived on Guam in 54 - 57 it was pretty plain that Kilroy had been everywhere.

~37, Murr, one of the problems here is with definitions. I am not convinced that definitions of slang, and related groups such as argot, cant etc have ever been specifically agreed. I rather suspect that certain ways of speaking 'at a level below standard' were given terminologies but that these have merged, changed or mutated over time.

Perhaps abecedary could help us with this one?

One of the 2 definitions given for slang in the Webster online is 'language peculiar to a particular group', which fits with my point 2. in message 30. Their definition for argot is almost identical.

I would use "jargon" for professional language (medical, legal, IT), "argot" for groups that use it as a sort of code because they are operating on the edge of the law (thieves' cant, for e.g.), and "slang" for casual spoken stuff used by general population groups (youth, etc.).

I believe this is generally how the terms are used, at least in my country at present, but definitions can be very arbitrary things and probably the words have changed over time.

>41 zenomax:, 42 excellent points, and most excellent and reasonable definitions.

NOW HEAR THIS.

For the purpose of future discussion on this topic, I hereby confirm and declare that Anna's definitions in 42 are adopted as OFFIZIEL by the SAL.

All in favour say EYE!

Motion adopted. Carry on.

I would go for all of those. My own definition of slang is a 'counter-language', a coinage that draws quite consciously on the term 'counter-culture' as used (and by me experienced in what was then the UK's 'underground press') in the 1960s/early 1970s. The premise being that if there is a standard, i.e standard English, then as in much else many humans are keen to run against it, or at least to come up with some form of alternative. In the case of language one way of doing it is by using this 'counter-language', slang. This is not, of course, in any way a linguistic definition.

In my own dictionaries of slang I try very hard to exclude jargon, which I too would term 'occupational' or 'professional slang' but drawing hard-and-fast lines is sometimes debatable. For instance, it could be argued that drug slang - a vast lexicon - is really jargon, i.e. the 'occupational slang' of drug users, but I would suggest that that constituency is now so vast, and impinges so much on the world at large that for a slang lexicographer to exclude it would be foolish. On the other hand, I include relatively little military terminology; my predecessor Eric Partridge had a great deal, but that vocabulary was much more widely used - by veterans of World War I, combatants and recent veterans of World War II - when his dictionaries first came out, and again, he would have been mistaken to exclude it on 'jargon' grounds.

Aside from its synonymity with 'the code of a fringe group' (which means that 'argot' might be a good cubbyhole for drug slang) argot is of course specifically French criminal slang, the first major glossary of which was recorded in 1455, a little earlier than its UK equivalent, which one finds in Robert Copland's 'Hye Waye to the Spital House' (c.1535). What I find most interesting about this is that before argot meant the language it meant the people: the (criminal) beggars, pedlars and minor merchants who actually used it. It was not en-dictionaried as 'argot' = a form language, until 1740 (but then the word 'slang' meaning a form of language did not even appear in print, let alone in a lexicon, until 1756.) And just to complicate matters further, among the languages that they did use, and which were not yet termed argot, there was something called 'jargon' (originally 'the twittering of birds'), which was defined as 'the corrupt and criminal language of the people, the peasantry, which one can scarcely understand'. That, of course, was more like UK cant than any 'professional' slang. And to round it off, the first printed use of 'argot' in any sense was in a glossary published in 1628: 'Jargon ou langage de l’argot reformé', in which argot was still the speaker rather than the spoke.

(I have written more on French argot. It was published in the Critical Quarterly, but I'm not sure if that is freely accessible online. If anyone is interested I can send them a copy)

#44 Jonathon, glad you made it.

And thanks for posting a well informed and interesting piece to help our meanderings. I think many of us in this group appreciate the arcane and obscure areas of language so your little illustrations are of real value here.

For those of you who have not come across abecedary, he is Jonathon Green a published slang lexicographer. I invited Jonathon as an 'expert witness' in our proceedings here.

Jonathon - hopefully you will be able to stick around for the life of this thread (and for others in this group which might be of interest).

Jonathon, as the founder of the SAL, let me also welcome you and thank you for taking the time to contribute and educate us.

Extremely interesting. I had no idea that the collection of slang was such an old activity: 1455! that's like 100 years before Shakespeare! I bet some of those old slang collections are amazing.

perhaps we could use the term l'argot (not to be confused with l'escargot) to describe those people who lurk in the salon, as that's kind of a counter culture activity?

Doesn't slang actually date back even further, to the cave man who called a woolly mammoth a "double-wide"?

pooh.. a while back i gave my copy of a Dictionary of Australian Slang, 1945 to a friend who actually visits Australia with some regularity. I'm sure most of the terms for barfing have been superseded, or, perhaps, super-sized, anyway.
-------------------------------
2 words for the day from said slim volume:
Jersey - a red-headed person (her daughter's a redhead)
Jiggerypook - humbug; nonsense

Is that l'argot or l'ergot?

'If we are to believe implicitly the saying of the wise man, that "there is nothing new under the sun" the "fast"
men of buried Nineveh, with their knotty and door-matty looking beards, may have cracked Slang jokes on the steps of Sennacherib's palace; and the stocks sic and stones of Ancient Egypt, and the bricks
of venerable and used up Babylon, may, for aught we know, be covered with slang hieroglyphics unknown to modern antiquarians.'

John Camden Hotten, introduction to The Slang Dictionary (1859)

Not sure this is strictly slang, but I was intrigued when, several years back, I read in Mayhew that whilst many of the London lower ranks placed a 'w' in place of a 'v' at the beginning of words (as witnesses in the works of Dickens and others), it was also claimed that it had been equally fashionable (in these circles) to replace a 'w' with a 'v'.

Mayhew had discounted this as a tale spun to him by one of his interviewees.

However, in Jerry Whites book on 19th century London it is confirmed that this v in place of w did in fact occur.

Anyway, apart from making me inordinately happy, this also raises the question for me as to whether such things are - like slang - a way of signalling one's belonging to a particular group?

I think here also of the British upper middle class practice of replacing the r with a w.

Any thoughts?

>51 zenomax: I recall reading a pronunciation thread somewhere where a bunch of Londoners were going over the peculiarities of their accents, and one of the things that kept coming up was who pronounced "squirrel" as "skwiwoo", which blew my mind so hard until I sounded it out.

Have you heard about Les Incroyables/Les Merveilleuses? Upper-class bohemian thugs in revolutionary Paris. They are amazing for many reasons, but mostly because they dropped "r"in their speech because it stood for "revolution"--thus making them the "Incoyables" and "Meveilleuses".

>52 MeditationesMartini: lol, good to bring that Royalist excentricity back to our attention !

- Je ne peux pas souff'i' la lette'e "R"
- Elle nous 'appelle t'op la 'evolution !

French like these kind of jokes. Remember the black guy on the pirate ship in the Asterix comic. He speaks all the time like that. It gets really hilarious when he starts speaking Latin in " petit-nègre " style !

Oh tempo'e, oh mo'es

>53 Macumbeira: they were true geniuses:)

53: I need to get those comics in French. They are funny in English as well but I bet they are absolutely hysterical in the original.

Make sure they are written by the genius Rene Goscinny. He died in '77. All Asterix, Lucky Luke or Iznogoud comics after that black year have lost their genial spark.

Goscinny was at his best between 1970 and 1977
and yes to be savoured in French.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Goscinny

44 -
Thanks for your post. It was truly interesting. I however have nothing more to add to this thread than that. :)

The Asterix books are wonderful. I found a few of the older ones at a market in Dijon a couple of years ago. Of course, now I wish I had bought all she had!

amazon france ?

How hard is it to order from a foreign Amazon? I hate Amazon in America; I might tolerate the source of my hatred if it would get me books I'd otherwise not get. I wouldn't mind having some Asterix in French.

Robert

If you live in US you'll have to pay taxes

Happened to me when I orderdered at amazon.com

Now I order at either amazon france uk or germany.
Uk quotes in pounds
france and germany in euro

I'm having a hard time navigating the French site, but I may try it when I'm feeling braver and flusher. I looked at the Pleiades edition of Les Miserables; the description was not very full, and the price was roughly huge. Thanks for your reminder about taxes.

Robert

If you can afford les pleiades, who cares about taxes ? : )

Yeah, I think I can't. Do you know whether there is anything in France for French books like The Library of America or the Norton Critical Editions in English?

Robert

I don't know, but French books in general are rather cheap.

In general Flammarion editions of classics have better forwords and commentaries.

Poche and folio are the mainstream

Thank you.

Robert

If you like French comix then may I recommend another example: Les Pieds Nickelés (literally 'shiny feet', actually a slang term for people who prefer to live on their wits than work). Started in 1908. Very anarchic, anti-establishment and slangy.

You can find them at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Pieds_Nickel%C3%A9s

In French - they don't make it to English language wikipedia - but there are links to elsewhere.

Cher Amateurs,

Please be advised that starting in March, Jonathan Green (abecedary) will have his own featured 'author of the month thread' over in Le Salon Populaire.

Mr Green's contributions to le Salon on the slang thread have been fascinating, and we are happy to make his expertise available to more Salonistas. So please pop over and engage in the conversation.

My special thanks to Zenomax for arranging this, and to Enrique for agreeing to host, and of course to abecedary for agreeing to participate. I'm sure it will be a great conversation.

Comment #19.

Thank you, and all of the other contributors, for all of the valuable discussion and information on slang.

When I read the examples given in example #19, I reveled in the pleasure that this language gave me. It immediately reminded me of the same kind of pleasure I get every time I say or hear agenbite of inwit, or any other intriguing bits of the work of James Joyce. Poetry and slang have in common a beauty of language that grabs you immediately, before you have even had time to fully process the signifier-signified part of the language. It just sounds great, and the meaning is the icing on the cake. That is how I always feel about really good slang, it is not randomly selected words or sounds, but words or sounds selected with keen creativity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayenbite_of_Inwyt

If I may, I would like to offer comments about French editions, relating to comment #65, even though I understand this is not the actual topic of this group thread.

My favourite source for low-price French literature is Bouquins by Laffont at
http://www.bouquins.tm.fr/

Home page for the whole corporation:
http://www.laffont.fr/index.asp

Most of the books in this series are 1200 to 1500 pages, so you can pack a lot of words into one book. So far not a single one of them has had problems with the gum starting to crack after 15 years. A couple of my Penguins from 30 years ago have had the gum in the binding disintegrate, and now it is only an elastic band holding the pages together.

I do not know the technical terms associated with reprint editions, but some of the pages are a little bit fuzzy. Whatever the technical means that premium books use to get the surgically clean lines in the type would be more desirable, but I know that costs more money.

Previously I have collected some music scores by one publisher that is extremely finely focused with no blur problems whatsoever: G. Henle Verlag. I read that they use metal engraving plates to produce their music scores.

What is the other method called, anyway? Lithography? I must read more about printing technology.

I love all of my cheaper editions of french works by Folio, Gallimard, J'ai lu, etc. But yes, I love all the books in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade with their super thin pages and plain covers. If anything, they pack more words in a smaller book than Bouquins do. I have only ever read Pléiade books from the library and own none, and I just checked Amazon, and I see the do cost a pretty penny. But worth it if you are going to keep them in your family library for an indefinite period.