2. Forms and functions of youth slang in Modern English

2.1 Characteristics of youth slang in Modern English

The forms and functions of any language vary systematically, not only according to geography, but also in synchrony with social levels, cultural uses, and various communicative functions. Linguistic signs that encode social phenomena are seen as belonging to a specific register (a variety determined by degree of formality). If they are associated with an educated and high-class register, they are considered to be part of jargon. A slang form may be a new word coined for a specific reason, such as glitz (gaudiness) or hype (advertising that relies on gimmicks). Or it may be an old word with a new meaning, such as fly (stylish) or issues ( problems). People use slang more often than they realize.

And it has a very high level of appeal (even if a secretive appeal). This is so because it is a type of poetry, bespeaking of friendliness, commonality, and inbuilt musicality; jargon, on the other hand, is not. And this poetic basis of slang might explain why many slang expressions become colloquialisms, passing into everyday conversation and blending perfectly with it.

In a brilliant new book, Slang: The people’s poetry, Michael Adams, an internationally- renowned expert on slang and linguistic variation, has provided a rationale for understanding the underlying reasons why slang is, in fact, a type of basic poetry and, hence, the reason for its appeal. Semiotically, Adams’ book is of great interest because it shows how slang originates in a form of poetic iconicity, that is, as a modeling device of the world, recreating it evaluatively through sound, sense, and reference. The inbuilt poeticism of slang was discussed by Connie Eble in several superb studies, starting in the late 1980s, on the forms and functions of youth slang (Eble 1989, 1996, 2004). Adams goes further by digging deeply into the originating forces of poeticism, revealing the presence of a creative impulse in humans in the ways they create and use language. The makers of slang (and that means anyone at any age) are essentially “poets,” who use the resources of a language to make inferences about the world, to give it a particular aesthetic shape, and to literally imbue it with “sense.”

The implications of Adams’ work thus go far beyond the usual analysis of linguistic variation. Slang presents us with a sample of how linguistic semiosis might originate and function in our species. Indeed, it seems to provide basic clues to unlocking the mystery of language phylogenesis. Poeticism in language is essentially a form of what may be called echoism, as the ancient Greeks claimed (Stam 1976; Danesi 2008). Echoism is supported by two undeniable facts: (1) imitation is a basic tendency in language ontogenesis (as developmental psychology has amply showed); (2) echoic words make up large portions of the world’s core vocabularies. Stross captures the idea behind echoism with the following words:

Humans and birds especially seem to have rather well developed abilities to imitate many environmental sounds, especially sounds made by other animals, and this ability could well have been very useful to protohominids for luring game. Could sounds used by protohominids to lure game or mimic sounds of nature come to represent the game or other objects in nature in the minds of these prelinguistic humans? (Stross 1976: 21)

Residues of echoism can be seen in languages throughout the world and, as we discover in Adams’ treatise, in the various slang forms that all languages generate on a daily basis. Loudness, for example, is used commonly to communicate anger. Similarly, increasing the rate of speech delivery seems universally to express urgency, while whispering seems to imply secrecy. The purpose here is to discuss the various aspects of “poetic competence” as Adams presents them through the template of slang, deriving broader implications not only for the study of language but also, more generally, for the study of verbal semiosis.

Adam’s opening chapter deals with theories and views of slang. Based partly on previous work (Adams 2003), he starts by shattering existing biased views of slang as informal and restricted language. He does so by illustrating the kind of aesthetic and cognitive effects typical slang words have on all us, whether we like it or not, and then arguing that the higher their hidden appeal the more likely they are to blend into mainstream language. In effect, Adams questions the typical standard-versus-nonstandard and formal-versus-informal dichotomies made by linguists, arguing correctly that it really is a matter of historical process, selectivity, evaluation, rather than intrinsic substance, especially since we are hardly ever aware of how many slang-based items we use regularly believing that they belong to the domain of so-called “standard” speech. The example I like to give is that of the word jazz (Danesi 1994). The term was originally coined as slang for “sexual intercourse.” When we use it today, however, it is unlikely that this meaning comes to mind. Rather, we tend to think of jazz as a “refined” genre of music that has a high cultural value. Its origin in brothels is now largely a lost memory.

Slang finds its way into the cultural mainstream in many ways, as Adams points out. In the past, its primary conduits were writers and people in positions of authority. Shakespeare, for instance, brought onto the stage, and thus subsequently into acceptable usage, such slang terms of his era as hubbub, to bump, and to dwindle. But today with many channels of influence, from the traditional media to the Internet, anyone can really spread slang with or without writing credentials. The chances of a slang item spreading today are increasing at the speed of cybernetic information flow. Indeed, there is so much slang out there, that the primary criterion that filters out most of the items, letting through others, is that of need. If a slang term comes about at a time to fill a need, then it will crystallize and become part of general linguistic practice.

Another criterion is that of aesthetics. If people like a new word, they’ll start to use it and it will eventually become part of langue (as Saussure [1916] called linguistic competence). In effect, slang starts out as parole but, if it has a high aesthetic appeal, it tends eventually to become part of langue. Adams puts it aptly as follows:

I argue that slang is not merely a lexical phenomenon, a type of word, but a linguistic practice rooted in social needs and behaviors, mostly the complementary needs to fit in and to stand out. In addition, slang asserts our everyday poetic prowess as we manipulate the sounds, shapes, and effects of words; the pleasure we take in the slang we speak and hear is, at least sometimes, an aesthetic pleasure. And, though it plays only a bit part in the linguistic epic, slang may figure in our “linguistic competence,” that is, the innate human capacity to acquire and use language. We can’t tell the story of language unless we account for all its characters, slang included. ( p. 6)

How does slang work? Instead of theorizing about it extensively, as is too often the case, Adams takes us on a fascinating trek through the mechanisms that undergird slang constructions, thus showing by illustration what slang is all about. As a case-in-point, consider the kind of slang used typically by adolescents. Slang words are coined by teens typically to gain control of the social world which they inhabit and, thus, to evaluate the world around them, on their own terms. As children, we are given the lexical and grammatical resources to encode information and concepts. We experiment with these creatively, but ultimately culture wins out and, quietly, we utilize the language forms we are exposed in order to understand the world. At adolescence, the poetic instinct resurfaces, as adolescents attempt to reorder the world linguistically, coming to grips with it in autonomous ways. So, when a 1950s teenager coined the word jock to refer to an adolescent personality type, he or she was providing an evaluative template through which one could view that type. A jock is someone who is in love with his physique and overall muscular and energetic appearance.

The word is a verbal portrait, packed with poetic connotations. It is a phallic metonym that reverberates with social meaning, both portraying and satirizing a particular type of young male.

As Adams cogently argues, we hardly ever realize that words like jock are born as slang creations, gradually becoming colloquialisms in the speech of all.

Words and expressions such as cool, chick, dude, sloshed, chill out, 24/7, among many others, have a similar slang origination, having become so much

a part of our everyday vocabulary that we no longer remember as slang concoctions. Adolescents have always spoken in distinct ways that they acquire unconsciously from their particular social environment. Predictably, such speech is highly variable, continually changing from one teen generation to the next, from one clique to another. But in all generations of teen slang, the underlying mechanism of poetic portraiture is the same.

Once could say that slang is a form of what anthropologists call “word magic,” a perception of the power of language that has always characterized social rituals in all kinds of cultures across time. The link between language and ritual was probably forged at the origin of human culture when certain words were felt to have awesome magical powers. That primeval feeling of awe is still evident in children’s eyes when they listen to poetic texts, to a magician’s abracadabra, or to an Open Sesame formula (used by Ali Baba in Arabian nights to open the door of the cave occupied by robbers). The word abracadabra derives from the letters positioned in the inverted pyramid design of an amulet worn around the neck in a previous era. In each line of the pyramid there was a letter that purportedly vanished magically until only the A remained to form the vertex of the triangle. As each of the letters disappeared, so too did the disease or problem of the amulet wearer. The feeling that particular words are magical has become largely unconscious in modern-day people, but the residues of word magic are everywhere. We take oaths to fulfill certain pledges; expressions such as “Oh, God” and “Thank Heaven” characterize common conversations, even though we scarcely think of them as sacred formulas; when someone sneezes, we utter “Bless you,” no longer realizing that the words are meant to ward off evil or sickness; and so on and so forth. Word magic also encompasses taboo, a word that comes from the tribal Polynesian language, Tongan, where it means “holy” or “untouchable.” Among the Zuñi people of New Mexico, the word takka (frogs) is prohibited during religious ceremonies because of its vulgar connotations; in our own world, so-called four-letter words are considered obscene, and taboo in sacred places; language that offends or provokes a public disturbance is held by many societies to be in violation of the law.

Slang is word magic in modern guise serving both the sacred and profane functions of human life. It covers the whole range of functions, from secrecy to colloquial dialogue. And like all word magic systems, it is exciting language.

Adams puts it as follows:

Somewhere on the line from the language of secrecy to the language of everyday being slang gathers a head of poetic steam and accelerates past colloquial speech. Slang is fast and exciting, and you can’t sustain the speed and the rush, so you’ll always slow into plain English again. But every word of the ride was worth it.(p.43)

The social dynamics of slang

Speech is not merely a tool of communication but a fundamental human characteristic implicated in social and personal identity. Humans are social animals; if you don’t belong to at least one group, then you aren’t a fully realized person. Inevitably, you identify with a group and its speech; in turn, you will be dentified by that speech, until someone outside the group successfully appropriates it. ( pp. 59– 60)

I have never before seen as comprehensive a study of the social dynamics of slang as is the present chapter. It is impossible to do it justice in a simple review like this one. Let me approach it by looking at it from the standpoint of what Leslie Savan (2005) calls “pop language.” This technique allows me to go around Adams’ actual treatment in order to get a better view of it from a different angle from the outside.

Savan argues that modern-day conversational style is glib and superficial originating from a slang base promulgated through the media. Expressions such as “OK. Whatever!” ,“Just don’t go there”, “Deal with it!” and “That is so yesterday,” among the many that now characterize English dialogue, started as slang, having crossed over into everyday speech producing a type of langue that she calls “pop language.” Like fashion trends in “pop culture,” trends in pop language spread broadly because they are present in the media where they take on great value and power. What Savan misses in her critique though, and which Adams brings out rather emphatically, is that the “standard” language we purportedly spoke before the advent of pop language has always been influenced slang, understood as the parole of common folk. For example, in the 1950s the word cool emerged as shibboleth for the lifestyle that the “golden era of rock” entailed. It meant (and continues to mean) an unspoken knowledge of how to look, walk, and talk in socially-attractive ways. Cool male teens modeled themselves after James Dean, Marlon Brando or Elvis Presley; cool female teens modeled themselves after Connie Francis and singers in groups such as the Shirelles. Today, cool is no longer perceived as having had a specific function in 1950s adolescent parole. It has jumped over to the “standard” language, having become part of langue, where it means dressing, looking, and behaving in fashionable or trendy ways.

Actually, the word cool was used by young people to describe attractive lifestyle images as far back as the 1920s. It resurfaced in the 1950s to describe

a new surge of youth culture. The choices people have today for “looking cool” are much more eclectic than in the past, but the underlying meaning of the word has. Flappers in the 1920s were cool; 1950s rock stars were cool; rappers today are cool; movie stars are cool; and so on. Synonyms for cool, such as hip and groovy, have a similar kind of etymological story behind them. Incidentally, it is no coincidence that the counterculture youth of the 1960s and early 1970s were called “hippies.” They word hip has a long history behind it bespeaking a subversive attitude, based on rejecting the customs, traditions, and lifestyles of mainstream society, called the “establishment” by the hippies. The same kind of subversive meaning is imprinted in the hip-hop term that emerged in the 1980s to describe the attendant lifestyle associated with rap music.

Slang allows people to “talk the talk.” It is part of the fun of the everyday spectacle of communal life. It often starts out in the domain of youth culture, but if it has intrinsic poetic appeal it will spread to the mainstream langue. Consider the word hot, as used today to indicate someone sexy (including morphemic variants such as hottie). As it turns out, hot has been around since 1000 CE with three meanings: “elevated temperature,” “temperament and health,” and “eagerness.” It is the latter meaning that allowed hot to morph into an adjective meaning “passionate” (as in hot-headed). Around 1500, poets started using it to describe passionate love, as in hot love, which meant, “excited by sexual desire.” This meaning spread in the 1800s, transforming the word into a term for “object of desire,” as in “She is hot.” In the 1920s, this meaning was attached to celebrities, movie stars, and jazz musicians, all of whom were perceived as living sexy lifestyles. It was used, for example, to describe the New Orleans style of jazz, as exemplified by Louis Armstrong. A 1933 film titled Hot pepper, featuring a sexy siren, epitomized, and probably ensconced, and the use of hot as a code word for sexual attractiveness. From the 1930s to the 1960s the expression hot pants came forward as a slang term for sexy men and women. So, the use today of hottie in a sexual sense has really been a part of pop language for a very long time. Although it would seem that pop language is characteristic of our contemporary world, it has always really been a linguistic reflex of pop culture. It is language by the people for the people.

Consider the counterpart of hot again, namely cool. The term cool jazz emerged to describe a slow, deliberate style of jazz in 1947, when musician

Charlie Parker used it explicitly to define his type of musical style. A year later,

Life magazine titled an article on jazz as follows: “Bebop: New jazz school is led by trumpeter who is hot, cool and gone.” From there it made it way into the 1950s youth culture and from there into its current broad usage.

As Adams cogently argues and illustrates, the history of slang is a history of culture. He discusses the word hip, which John Leland (2004) traces back to 1619 when the first blacks arrived off the coast of Virginia, who coined it to convey a sense of identity different from that of white culture. Hip was (and continues to be) all about a smooth and subtly subversive sexual attitude, similar to the one exemplified by current hip-hop artists in their videos. It is no coincidence that they call themselves “hip-hop.” It is a term laden with historical connotations. Hip. As Leland argues, is something that one feels, rather than understands rationally. It has always been linked to musical styles such as the blues, jazz, swing, rock, and hip-hop. The group Tower of Power defined hip in 1973 as: “Hipness is — What it is! And sometimes hipness is, what it ain’t.” Hip conveys identity that is different from mainstream conformity. It refers to a ways of talking, walking, and looking that is designed to put oneself in contrast to the mainstream, to stand out. Leland points out that Bugs Bunny was hip, because he exemplified a kind of sassy attitude that always got the better of Elmer Fudd, defined as the ultimate “square.” “What’s up, Doc?” is pure hip talk.

As Adams points out, slang is a powerful weapon that has been often used to mock the social order, either directly or by insinuation. It bespeaks of a transgressive attitude that says “I’ll do it my way.” Slang can also penetrate such seemingly inviolate systems as the orthography of a language. The history of American English shows, in fact, a constant need to forge an identity separate from that of the British founders of America through spelling differentiations. Noah Webster, for example, proposed in 1828 the elimination of u in words such as colour, harbour, favour, and odour. His proposal was accepted, not because it seemed simply to reflect the phonetics of the words better, but because it symbolized a feature that could be sued to distinguish American from British English and thus, by implication, to set America apart from its British past. Changes of this kind symbolize a break with tradition. American English was a language that was considered to be subversive by the British. No wonder, then, that it has always had an emotional charge to it.

Psychologically, most good slang harks back to the stage in human culture when animism was a worldwide religion. At that time, it was believed that all objects had two aspects, one external and objective that could be perceived by the senses, the other imperceptible (except to gifted individuals) but identical with what we today would call the "real" object. Human survival depended upon the manipulation of all "real" aspects of life--hunting, reproduction, warfare, weapons, design of habitations, nature of clothing or decoration, etc.--through control or influence upon the animus, or imperceptible phase of reality. This influence was exerted through many aspects of sympathetic magic, one of the most potent being the use of language. Words, therefore, had great power, because they evoked the things to which they referred.

Civilized cultures and their languages retain many remnants of animism, largely on the unconscious level. In Western languages, the metaphor owes its power to echoes of sympathetic magic, and slang utilizes certain attributes of the metaphor to evoke images too close for comfort to "reality." For example, to refer to a woman as a "broad" is automatically to increase her girth in an area in which she may fancy herself as being thin. Her reaction may, thus, be one of anger and resentment, if she happens to live in a society in which slim hips are considered essential to feminine beauty.

Slang, then, owes much of its power to shock to the superimposition of images that are incongruous with images (or values) of others, usually members of he dominant culture. Slang is most popular when its imagery develops incongruity bordering on social satire. Every slang word, however, has its own history and reasons for popularity. When conditions change, the term may change in meaning, be adopted into the standard language, or continue to be used as slang within certain enclaves of the population. Nothing is flatter than dead slang. In 1910, for instance, "Oh you kid" and "23-skiddoo" were quite stylish phrases in the U.S. but they have gone with the hobble skirt.

Children, however, unaware of anachronisms, often revive old slang under a barrage of older movies rerun on television. Some slang becomes respectable when it loses its edge; "spunk," "fizzle," "spent," "hit the spot," "jazz," "funky," and "p.o.'d," once thought to be too indecent for feminine ears, are now family words. Other slang survives for centuries, like "bones" for dice (Chaucer), "beat it" for runaway (Shakespeare), "duds" for clothes, and "booze" for liquor (Dekker). These words must have been uttered as slang long before appearing in print, and they have remained slang ever since. Normally, slang has both a high birth and death rate in the dominant culture, and excessive use tends to dull the lustre of even the most colourful and descriptive words and phrases. The rate of turnover in slang words is undoubtedly encouraged by the mass media, and a term must be increasingly effective to survive.

While many slang words introduce new concepts, some of the most effective slang provides new expressions--fresh, satirical, shocking--for established concepts, often very respectable ones. Sound is sometimes used as a basis for this type of slang, as, for example, in various phonetic distortions (e.g., pig Latin terms). It is also used in rhyming slang, which employs a fortunate combination of both sound and imagery. Thus, gloves are "turtledoves" (the gloved hands suggesting a pair of billing doves), a girl is a "twist and twirl" (the movement suggesting a girl walking), and an insulting imitation of flatus, produced by blowing air between the tip of the protruded tongue and the upper lip, is the "raspberry," cut back from "raspberry tart." Most slang, however, depends upon incongruity of imagery, conveyed by the lively connotations of a novel term applied to an established concept. Slang is not all of equal quality, a considerable body of it reflecting a simple need to find new terms for common ones, such as the hands, feet, head, and other parts of the body. Food, drink, and sex also involve extensive slang vocabulary. Strained or synthetically invented slang lacks verve, as can be seen in the desperate efforts of some sportswriters to avoid mentioning the word baseball--e.g., a batter does not hit a baseball but rather "swats the horsehide," "plasters the pill," "hefts the old apple over the fence," and so on.

The most effective slang operates on a more sophisticated level and often tells something about the thing named, the person using the term, and the social matrix against which it is used. Pungency may increase when full understanding of the term depends on a little inside information or knowledge of a term already in use, often on the slang side itself. For example, the term Vatican roulette (for the rhythm system of birth control) would have little impact if the expression Russian roulette were not already in wide usage.

Diffusion of slang

Slang invades the dominant culture as it seeps out of various subcultures. Some words fall dead or lie dormant in the dominant culture for long periods. Others vividly express an idea already latent in the dominant culture and these are immediately picked up and used. Before the advent of mass media, such terms invaded the dominant culture slowly and were transmitted largely by word of mouth. Thus a term like snafu, its shocking power softened with the explanation "situation normal, all fouled up," worked its way gradually from the military in World War II by word of mouth (because the media largely shunned it) into respectable circles. Today, however, a sportscaster, news reporter, or comedian may introduce a lively new word already used by an in- group into millions of homes simultaneously, giving it almost instant currency. For example, the term uptight was first used largely by criminal narcotic addicts to indicate the onset of withdrawal distress when drugs are denied. Later, because of intense journalistic interest in the drug scene, it became widely used in the dominant culture to mean anxiety or tension unrelated to drug use. It kept its form but changed its meaning slightly.

Other terms may change their form or both form and meaning, like "one for the book" (anything unusual or unbelievable). Sportswriters in the U.S. borrowed this term around 1920 from the occupational language of then legal bookmakers, who lined up at racetracks in the morning ("the morning line" is still figuratively used on every sports page) to take bets on the afternoon races. Newly arrived bookmakers went to the end of the line, and any bettor requesting unusually long odds was motioned down the line with the phrase, "That's one for the end book." The general public dropped the "end" as meaningless, but old-time gamblers still retain it. Slang spreads through many other channels, such as popular songs, which, for the initiate, are often rich in double entendre.

When subcultures are structurally tight little of their language leaks out. Thus the Mafia, in more than a half-century of powerful criminal activity in America, has contributed little slang. When subcultures weaken, contacts with the dominant culture multiply, diffusion occurs, and their language appears widely as slang. Criminal narcotic addicts, for example, had a tight subculture and a highly secret argot in the 1940s; now their terms are used freely by middle-class teenagers, even those with no real knowledge of drugs.

Attitudes toward slang

With the rise of naturalistic writing demanding realism, slang began to creep into English literature even though the schools waged warfare against it, the pulpit thundered against it, and many women who aspired to gentility and refinement banished it from the home. It flourished underground, however, in such male sanctuaries as lodges, poolrooms, barbershops, and saloons. By 1925 a whole new generation of U.S. and European naturalistic writers was in revolt against the Victorian restraints that had caused even Mark Twain to complain, and today any writer may use slang freely, especially in fiction and drama. It has become an indispensable tool in the hands of master satirists, humorists, and journalists. Slang is now socially acceptable, not just because it is slang but because, when used with skill and discrimination, it adds a new and exciting dimension to language. At the same time, it is being seriously studied by linguists and other social scientists as a revealing index to the culture that produces and uses it.

Formation

Slang expressions are created by the same processes that affect ordinary speech. Expressions may take form as metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech (dead as a doornail). Words may acquire new meanings (cool, cat). A narrow meaning may become generalized (fink, originally a strikebreaker, later a betrayer or disappointer) or vice-versa (heap, a run-down car). Words may be clipped, or abbreviated (mike, microphone), and acronyms may gain currency (VIP, awol, snafu). A foreign suffix may be added (the Yiddish and Russian -nik in beatnik) and foreign words adopted (baloney, from Bologna). A change in meaning may make a vulgar word acceptable (jazz) or an acceptable word vulgar (raspberry, a sound imitating flatus; from raspberry tart in the rhyming slang of Australia and Cockney London; Sometimes words are newly coined (oomph, sex appeal, and later, energy or impact).

Position in the Language

Slang is one of the vehicles through which languages change and become renewed, and its vigor and color enrich daily speech. Although it has gained respectability in the 20th century, in the past it was often loudly condemned as vulgar. Nevertheless, Shakespeare brought into acceptable usage such slang terms as hubbub, to bump, and to dwindle, and 20th-century writers have used slang brilliantly to convey character and ambience. Slang appears at all times and in all languages. A person’s head was kapala (dish) in Sanskrit, testa (pot) in Latin; testa later became the standard Latin word for head. Among Western languages, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Yiddish, Romanian, and Romany (Gypsy) are particularly rich in slang.