“The Life of Slang” by Julie Coleman

The origins of slang words more often than not are difficult if not impossible to pin down, but in general they are “produced in ways that aren’t particularly different from the ways Standard English words are produced” — both, for example, “borrow words from other languages, reuse existing words with new grammatical functions or with slightly different meanings, abbreviate words, and produce blends, acronyms, and initialisms.” Coleman argues that there are “four stages” in the development of slang: “creation,” “early development,” “adaptation and survival,” and “spreading into wider use.” Probably the vast majority of slang terms never are adopted beyond the relatively narrow circles in which they are created, and many die young, though “if identifying the birth of a slang term is hard, it’s harder still to pin down its death.” Something that was “the cat’s pajamas” in the 1920s might be “awesome” today, and if you tried to call it “the cat’s pajamas” the odds are that almost no one under age 65 would have any idea what you meant.

Still, some slang terms — or slang meanings for Standard English words — have persisted. Charles Dickens , whose ear for language was, well, awesome, caught wind of one while touring the United States in 1842. He described it in his “American Notes,” published that same year. A fellow diner, “handing me a dish of potatoes, broken up in milk and butter,” asked, “Will you try some of these fixings?” Dickens writes:

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(Oxford University Press) - ’The Life of Slang’ by Julia Coleman

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“There are few words that perform such various duties as this word ‘fix.’ It is the Caleb Quotem [Jack-of-all-trades] of the American vocabulary. You call upon a gentleman in a country town, and his help informs you that he is ‘fixing himself’ just now, but will be down directly: by which you are to understand that he is dressing. You inquire, on board a steamboat, of a fellow-passenger, whether breakfast will be ready soon, and he tells you he should think so, for when he was last below, they were ‘fixing the tables,’ in other words, laying the cloth. You beg a porter to collect your luggage, and he entreats you not to be uneasy, for he’ll ‘fix it presently:’ and if you complain of indigestion, you are advised to have recourse to Doctor So-and-so, who will ‘fix you’ in no time.”

Coleman does a good deal of bending over backward to define what slang is, which ends up involving a good deal of what it is not: “It’s not necessarily new, or linguistically unusual, or associated with uneducated people, or necessarily vulgar. It’s not just colloquial language taken to an extreme. It doesn’t include dialect or jargon, though local and professional slang do occur. It doesn’t include swearing, though some swearing is slang. Neither is it restricted to the spoken language to the extent that it once was.” In sum, according to Coleman , “slang is an attitude (insolence, for example, coolness, disdain, admiration, or a desire for conformity) expressed in words.” True enough, though it seems to me that one of the five definitions she cites from the Oxford English Dictionary comes closest to the mark: “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 special sense,” as in “wicked” to mean “excellent.”

Slang today isn’t what it was before the age of mass communications, the consumerist society and the Internet. “Slang was once considered a sign of poor breeding or poor taste,” Coleman writes, “but now it indicates that the speaker is fun-loving, youthful, and in touch with the latest trends. Although some adults try to discourage teenagers from using slang, plenty of others want to understand and adopt it.” This can lead to foolishness and self-parody — an adult using teen slang often merely underscores how old and out of touch he or she is — but it also is incontrovertible proof that slang is here to stay, not as the enemy of Standard English but as its partner.

THE LIFE OF SLANG

By Julie Coleman

Oxford Univ. 354 pp. $27.95