17. Special colloquial vocabulary

Slang

• Slang is a very ambiguous term, which is often used to denote almost everything that lies below the Standard English.

• Slang is subject to constant innovation, and words are replaced by new slangisms.

• Many words former slang words have come into Standard English vocabulary, e.g. kid.

• Slang never grows stale and if a slangism does become stale it is replaced by a new one. 

• Professor Galperin also suggests using the term «slang» for those forms of English vocabulary which are either mispronounced or distorted in some way phonetically, morphologically or lexically, also it may be used to specify some elements which are usually called over-colloquial

• There is a tendency to overestimate the significance of slang which is regarded as the quintessence of colloquial speech and therefore stands above all the laws of grammar.

• Sometimes it is regarded by some purists as a low language, but nowadays it is often considered to be vivid, flexible and picturesque.

A jargon

• A jargon is a term which denotes a group of words existing in every language, aimed at preserving secrecy within one or another social group. 

• Here there are mainly old words that have new meanings, e.g. loaf means hat, grease means money, tiger hunter means gambler.

• Jargonisms are social in character and not regional (the jargon of thieves, sportsmen).

• Jargon sounds like a foreign language for the outsiders of any social group. 

• Slang needs no translation, while jargon is code. It sometimes becomes recognized in the literary language of the country, e.g. fan

• Jargon words are used in emotive prose or sometimes publicist style to give the setting and to show the social position of the characters or to give the atmosphere of the subject of description. 

Professionalisms

• Professionalisms are used in a definite trade, profession or by people with common interests.

• Professionalisms are special words in the non-literary layer of the English Vocabulary, while terms belong to the literary layer. 

• Professionalisms are normally monosemantic, e.g. tin fish means submarine.

•  They are used in emotive descriptions to depict the natural speech of characters and disclose their psychological features. 

Dialectal words 

• Dialectal words are sometimes in the process of integration into the neutral language, remain beyond its literary boundaries and their use is referred to a lower layer. 

• They can be recognized as Standard Colloquial English, e.g. lassie  means a girl (Sc), lad  means a young man(Sc). 

• Dialectal words are mostly found in the sub-style of emotive prose. 

• Thus they are used to characterize personages through speech.

Vulgarisms

• Vulgarisms are swear words of an abusive character, e.g. demon, to Hell, goddamn, and obscene words.

• They are normally of Anglo-Saxon origin and are unlikely to acquire the status of Standard English though they are widely used.

• They are used to show the writer's personal attitude towards the matter (rarely in fact) or give the speech characteristic of the personage and create the setting (more often)

• Today vulgar words and obscene words of all kinds are found much more often in works of fiction than they used to be in the past.

Colloquial coinages or nonce-words

• Colloquial coinages or nonce-words are spontaneous inventions. 

• They are not fixed in dictionaries.

• They disappear from the language without a trace.

• Built by means of affixes they are based on certain semantic changes of words, e.g.to be the limit means to be unbearable.