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Obviously an individual in one of the groups or subcultures mentioned above, or any of many others, resorts to slang as a means of attesting membership in the group and of dividing him- or herself off from the mainstream culture. He or she merges both verbally and psychologically into the subculture that preens itself on being different from, in conflict with, and superior to the mainstream culture, and in particular to its assured rectitude and its pomp. Slang is thus an act of bracketing a smaller social group that can be comfortably joined and understood and be a shelter for the self. It is simultaneously an act of featuring and obtruding the self within the subculture — by cleverness, by control, by up-to-dateness, by insolence, by virtuosities of audacious and usually satirical wit, by aggression (phallic, if you wish). All this happens at fairly shallow levels in the psyche and can be readily understood. It explains most of what we know and feel about slang.
But what explains “it”? If, as the authorities agree, slang is a universal human trait and as old as the race itself, and if it came into being in the same human society where language itself was born, can we not seek deeper and more generalized explanations? Authorities also agree, as it happens, that the roots of slang must be sought in the deepest parts of the mind, in the unconscious itself. Although that territory is perilous ground for a working lexicographer, a few conjectures and a few relationships can be proposed for consideration. It seems that the deeper psychodynamics of slang has to do with two things: 1) defense of the ego against the superego, and 2) our simultaneous eagerness and reluctance to be human.
Surely wounded egos are the most common human non-anatomic possession. Slang might be seen as a remedy for them, as a self-administered therapy old as the first family that spoke. The family, like society, entails a hierarchy of power and of right, against which the healthy growing self of the child needs measures to compensate for its weakness and sinfulness. Slang as a remedy denies the weakness and brags about the sinfulness.
In this view, it would not be too much to claim that therapeutic slang is necessary for the development of the self; that society would be impossible without slang. It is curious that a linguistic phenomenon that seems so fleeting and so frivolous, as slang undeniably does, should at the same time be so deep and so vital to human growth and order. This is only one of the paradoxes of slang.
This aspect of slang is “deeper” than the matters mentioned above, like group identification and so on, only because it existed before groups, and it persists as groups themselves chop and change in the flux of history. In this aspect slang is similar to, and perhaps the same as, profanity. Like profanity slang is a surrogate for destructive physical action. Freud once remarked that the founder of civilization was the first man who hurled a curse rather than a rock or spear at his enemy. Slang also has this usefulness, and I suspect that profanity is a subcategory of slang, the more elemental phenomenon.
Hence, slang is language that has little to do with the main aim of language, the connection of sounds with ideas in order to communicate ideas, but is rather an attitude, a feeling, and an act. To pose another paradox: Slang is the most nonlinguistic sort of language.
“Our simultaneous eagerness and reluctance to be human” — what can that have to do with slang? Our notion here is that when you try to consider it deeply slang seems to join itself with several other phenomena: with Freud’s “dream-work,” with comedy, with elements of myth.
It seems that slang (we mean the slang impulse of the psyche) shares with all these the salvational and therapeutic function of both divorcing us from and maintaining our connection with genetic animality. Dream-work relieves us of the need to be reasonable and discharges the tension of the great burden with which our angelic rationality charges us. Although we are uncomfortable with paradox in ordinary language, we easily tolerate it in slang, where it seems as much at home as it is in the study of logic.
Slang links itself with comedy in the respect that it exploits and even celebrates human weakness, animality, without working to extirpate it. It makes room for our vileness, but only so much room. The great comic figures of our culture usually come in pairs, each member having its legitimacy, and each limiting the other: Sancho Panza and Don Quixote; Falstaff and Prince Hal; Huck Finn and who? — Tom Sawyer, Aunt Polly, even Jim. To these we may add the Wife of Bath, whose counterfigure was a part of herself, making her more like most of us than Sancho or Falstaff or Huck are. We may add, without too much strain, the comic figure Dante Alighieri over against Beatrice and the lightweight devil Mephistopheles over against Faust. What we seem to have in the comic heroes and in our own slang impulse is a reaching for or clinging to the primal earth, a nostalgie de la boue, which helps make tolerable the hard aspiration to be civilized and decent.
As to myth, Sancho, Alice of Bath, and Falstaff are modern myths themselves. For ancient myth we might think of Antaeus, whose strength was valid only while he had his feet on the earth, and of Silenus and the satyrs, and even of the Devil himself, who must, when he is not quoting scripture, speak a great deal of slang. We may also attend to the intriguing “trickster” figure who is so prevalent in world mythology. C. G. Jung reminds me of the slang impulse when he asserts, for example, “... [the trickster’s] fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and — last but not least — his approximation to the figure of a saviour.” In the same essay, “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,” Jung relates the trickster to the medieval Feast of Fools and other manifestations of the comic and slang spirit, especially those that deflate pomp, that prick presumption, that trip up our high horses. Jung believed that the civilizing process began within the framework of the trickster myth, which is a race memory of the human achievement of self-consciousness.
As the literary scholar Wylie Sypher said, “…man is not man without being somehow uneasy about the ‘nastiness’ of his body, [and] obscenity… is a threshold over which man enters into the human condition. ” For obscenity we might read slang, and observe that we are not so far beyond the threshold that we cannot always reach it with out foot, which is of clay.
Slang is also the idiom of the life force. That is, it has roots somewhere near those of sexuality, and it regularly defies death. What we have in mind is partly the “dirty” and taboo constituent of slang, but even more its tendency to kid about being hanged, electrocuted, murdered, or otherwise annihilated. Gallows humor is, from this point of view, more central to slang than may have been thought.
One changing pattern that has obvious connections with both socio- and psycholinguistics is the relation of slang to gender. In these times, and partly because of the feminist movement, women are more and more using the taboo and vulgar slang formerly accounted a male preserve. Sociologically this shows the determination of some women to enter the power structure by talking on this badge, among others, that denotes “maleness”, and simultaneously to shed the restrictions of the “ladylike” persona. Psychologically the implications are not that clear, but it may be that some women are determined to replicate at the core of their psyches the aggressive and ordering nature we have usually identified as a part of profound maleness, or else to show that these masculine traits do not lie as deep as we thought.
There isn’t any litmus test for slang and non-slang. Slang shares misty boundaries with a relaxed register usually called “informal” or “colloquial”, and we inevitable stray across the boundary, hence altogether this type of vocabulary combines slang and the so called unconventional English.
Slang also shares a boundary with a stylistic register we might call “figurative idiom”, in which inventive and poetic terms, especially metaphors, are used for novelty and spice, and incidentally for self-advertisement and cheekiness, in relief of a standard language that is accurate and clear but not personal and kinetic.
Sociolinguistic Aspects of Slang
In linguistics, where definitions at best are often imprecise and leaky, that of slang is especially notorious. The problem is one of complexity, such that a definition satisfying to one person or authority would seem inadequate to another because the prime focus is different. Like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant, all correctly, none sufficiently, we tend to stress one aspect or another of slang. Our stress will be on the individual psychology of slang speakers.
The external and quantitative aspects of slang, its sociolinguistics, have been very satisfactorily treated, nowhere, more so than in Stuart Berg Flexner’s masterful preface to the Dictionary of American Slang.
Recorded slang emerged, as the sketch of dictionaries has shown, from the special languages of subcultures, or perhaps we should call the more despised of them “undercultures”. The group of those people most persistently has been the criminal underworld itself, including the prison population, whose “cant” or “argot” still provides a respectable number of unrespectable terms. Other undercultures contributing heavily are those of:
· Hoboes and gypsies:
gimp — (hoboes and underworld) 1. A limp; 2. v: The old guy was gimping across the street; 3. A lame person: He’d just kick a gimp in the good leg and leave him lay (J.K. Winkler);
glom or glaum or glahm — (hoboes and underworld) 1. A hand, regarded as a grabbing tool; 2. To grasp, seize: She glommed the kid and held on tight; 3. To steal: “Where’d you glahm ‘em?” I asked (Jack London); … under the pretext of glomming a diamond from the strongbox (S. J. Perelman); 5. To be arrested; 6. To look at, seize with the eyes; = ganger, glim: … or walk around the corner to glom old smack heads, woozy winos and degenerates (New York Times); 7. n: Have a glom at that leg, won’t you?
· soldiers and sailors:
buddy-buddy — a close friend;
buck general — a brigadier general;
brass hat — 1. A high-ranking officer in the military or other uniformed services; 2. Any high-ranking official; manager; chief; = boss;
farm — to be killed in action; die in the armed services; = buy the farm: Just about my whole company farmed that day;
goof-off — (WW2 armed forces) a person who regularly or chronically avoids work; = fuck off: …getting kicked out of seminary as a goof-off (inside Sports); 2. A period of relaxation, respite: A little goof-off will do you good.
· the police:
blotter — 1. (police) the daily record of arrests at a police station; 2. drunkard; 3. (college students) LSD; (also blotter acid) a sheet of absorbent paper to which liquid LSD has been applied and then allowed to dry;
feeb or feebie — an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whom they call “Feebs” (Shapiro); …our heroes, the feebs, however (Village Voice); …make sure the Feebies didn’t get any credit for it (Patrick Mann);
· narcotics users:
get off — 1. (narcotics) to get relief and pleasure from a dose of narcotics: How we s’posed to get off with no water to mix the stuff with? (Philadelphia Bulletin); 2. (sex) to do the sex act; to have an orgasm: It is led by trendy bisexual types, who love to get off amidst the chic accouterments of a big smack-and-coke party (Albert Goldman); 3. (musicians) to play an improvised solo, to avoid the consequences of, get away with something: He thinks he can get off with charging $150 for this junk.
· - gamblers:
Hedge or hedge off — (gambling) To transfer part of one’s bets to another bookmaker as a means of reducing possible losses if too many of one’s clients were to win; 2. Something that offsets expected losses: People were buying gold as a hedge against inflation.
· - cowboys:
belly up — to die;
· - all sorts of students:
blind date — an arranged appointment for a show, dance, etc., where one’s partner is a previously unknown person, usually the friend of a friend;
blitzed – (college students) drunk: …really blitzed. Six beers on an empty stomach (Cameron Crowe);
· - show-business workers:
mugger — an actor or comedian, who makes exaggerated faces, grimaces, etc., for humorous effect: …where this trivial mugger is performing…(Gene Fowler);
never follow a dog act — be very careful about whom you are to be immediately compared with (Often a rueful comment after one has been outshone);
· - jazz musicians and devotees:
blow — to play a musical instrument, especially in jazz style and not necessarily a wind instrument: There will be three kids blowing guitar, banjo, and wash-board (Ed McBain);
blow up a storm — to play, especially jazz trumpet, cornet, clarinet, etc., with great skill and verve: I first heard Buddy Bolden play… He was blowing up a storm (Louis Armstrong);
· - athletes and their fans:
actor – (sports) an athlete who is good at pretending he has been hurt or fouled, especially a baseball player who very convincingly mimes the pain of being hit by a pitch.
· railroad and other transportation workers:
buggy — 1. (railroad) A caboose; 2. A car, especially an old rickety one; = heap, jalopy: I wouldn’t exactly call my Maserati a buggy.
· immigrant or ethnic populations cutting across these other subcultures:
kike — 1. a Jew (Sometimes used by Jews of other Jews they regard with contempt); 2. adj: kike neighborhood [origin unknown and much speculated upon; perhaps from Yiddish kikel “circle” because Jews who could not sign their names would make a circle; perhaps an alternation of Ike “Isaac”; perhaps because so many Jewish immigrant names ended in – ky or ki; perhaps from British dialect keek “peep”, used for a spy on a rival’s designs in the closing business].
In the 1980s some of these traditional spawning grounds for slang have lost their productivity, and that other subcultures have emerged to replace them. For example, general adoption of terms from hoboes, from railroad workers, from gypsies, and from cowboys has very nearly ceased, although the contributions of all these persist in the substrata of current slang. Criminals and police (cops and robbers) still make their often identical contributions, and gamblers continue to give us zesty coinages:
fish — 1. (prison) a new inmate: As a “fish” in Charlestown, I was physically miserable (Malcolm X); 2. (street gang) a nonmember of a street gang; a person regarded as inimical and distasteful by a street gang; 3. A stupid person, especially one easily victimized; = patsy, sucker: Why should he be the fish for the big guys? (Ira Wolfert); 4. A person, especially a criminal, thought of as being caught like a fish: The cops catch a lot of very interesting fish (Life); 5. (homosexuals) A heterosexual woman; 6. (students) A promiscuous woman; 7. (sports) A weak opponent: The superteams get stronger. They can pad their schedules with the occasional fish (Sports Illustrated); 8. A dollar: The job paid only fifty fish (Lionel Stander); 9. To seek information, especially by a legal or quasi-legal process having a very general aim; = go fishing; 10. To ask for something, usually a compliment, especially in an indirect and apparently modest way.
Teenagers and students can still be counted on for innovation and effrontery. Show business workers, although they have largely shed the raffish image of their roving and carnival past, are still a fertile source of slang. But several centers of gravity have shifted greatly during the past fifty or so years.
For example, the adoption of military, naval, and merchant marine slang has slowed to a relative trickle, not surprisingly. World Wars I and II probably gave the American people more general slang than any other events in history but they are now history, and the Korean and Vietnam wars have had in comparison a meager effect. Railroad slang has been replaced, though on a lesser scale, by the usage of airline workers and truck drivers:
grandma — (truckers) The lowest and slowest gear of a truck.
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, reggae, etc., - are making inroads.
Terms from “the drug scene” have multiplied astronomically, and a specialized book could easily be made from them alone:
bud — (teenagers) marijuana;
fall out — 1. To go to sleep or into a stuporous condition from narcotic intoxication: Only those who are uptight fall out (Saturday Review); If you resist falling out and pass the barrier, the curve is up to a mellow stupor (New York);
2. To become helpless with laughter or emotion; = crack up: I tried double tempo and everybody fell out laughing (Charlie Parker.
The “counterculture” helped disseminate many drug terms that might otherwise have remained part of a special vocabulary. Sports also make a much larger contribution, with football and even basketball not challenging but beginning to match baseball as prime producers:
bring it — (baseball) to throw a baseball fast;
grapefruit league — (baseball) The association of major league teams as they play each other in preseason training (most spring training camps are held in citrus-growing regions);
grass-cutter — (baseball) A very low and hard line drive.
Among the immigrant-ethnic bestowals, the influx from Yiddish continues strong in spite of the sociological shifting of the Jewish population:
haimish or heimish — friendly and informal; unpretentious; cozy: No one in his right mind would ever call Generals de Gaulle or MacArthur haimish (Leo Rosten) (from Yiddish, with root of haim “home”).
The old Dutch and German sources have dried up. The Italian carries on in modest proportion. The Hispanic has been surprisingly influential, although a heavier contribution is surely predictable.
All these are far outstripped by increased borrowing from black America, and this from the urban ghetto rather than the old Southern heartland. Close analysis would probably show that, what with the prominence of black people in the armed forces, in music, in the entertainment world, and in street and ghetto life, the black influence on American slang has been more pervasive in recent times than that of any other ethnic group in history. This can be conjectured, of course, without any implication that black Americans constitute a homogeneous culture:
bro’ — 1. brother;
2. a black person: the slick-speaking bro who scores points off the ofay (Time);
3. (motorcyclists) a motorcyclist = biker: the pack of twenty-seven bros jamming along the freeway (Easyriders).
Some sources of the slang are entirely or relatively new. Examples of this are the computer milieu and the hospital-medical-nursing complex:
GIGO or gigo — (computer) The output is no better than the input (from: g arbage i n, g arbage o ut);
gork — (hospital) 1. A stuporous or imbecilic patient; patient, who has lost brain function: The gork in that room has the “O” sign, did you notice? (Elizabeth Morgan); 2. To sedate a patient heavily.
In the first case an exciting technological inundation is at the base, and in the other, as in so many other trends of our era, the reason is television.
In the matter of sex, our period has witnessed a great increase in the number of terms taken over from homosexuals, especially male homosexuals. And it would be wrong to restrict the range of their contribution to sex terms alone, since the gay population merges with so many others that are educated, witty, observant, acerbic, and modish:
faggot — a male homosexual: Hot faggot queens bump up against chilly Jewish matrons (Albert Goldman); …an amazing job of controlling the faggots (Tennessee Williams);
fag hag or faggot’s moll — a heterosexual woman who seeks or prefers the company of homosexual men: Zeffirelli seems to have created a sort of limp-wrist commune, with Clare as the fag-hag (Judith Crist); Michael once referred to her…as “the fag hag of the bourgeoisie” (Armistead Maupin);
fairy godmother — a male homosexual’s homosexual initiator and tutor;
fairy lady — a lesbian who takes a passive role in sex;
girl — a male homosexual; 2. (narcotics) cocaine: They call cocaine girl because it gives ‘em a sexual job when they take a shot (C. cooper); 3. a queen of playing cards.
The “growth sector” hardest to characterize just now is in linear descent from the people old Captain Francis Grose, and Ben Jonson and others before him, called “university wits”. Today, trying to mark off this most fecund assemblage, we need a clumsy compound like “the Washington-Los Angeles-Houston-Wall Street-Madison Avenue nexus”. The American culture occupies these centers, and they occupy the culture through pervasive and unifying communications media. They give us the slang of the brass, of the execs, of middle management, of dwellers in bureaucracies, of yuppies, and of the talk shows and the “people” sort of columns and magazines. Bright, expressive, sophisticated people, moving and prospering with American lively popular culture, and not entirely buying it. They are the trend-setters and source of the slang that seems to come from everywhere and not to be susceptible of labeling. We will need more historical perspective before we can be usefully analytic about them, but they, whoever they are, clearly make up the wave of the present.
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