Slang

To-Day and Yesterday

Eric Partridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317432142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1933, this book explores both contemporary and historical slang, focusing on the characteristics and quirks of the English and American languages. As well as looking at commonly used slang, there are sections that give the reader insight into more unusual areas such as Cockney slang, slang in journalism and slang in commerce, as well as slang used by sailors, the law and the church. The book will be of interest to scholars and the general readers who take an interest in language.

Part I
General Considerations

SLANG TODAY AND YESTERDAY

Winged words: ἔπεα πτερόεντα.—HOMER.

Words are the very devil! " (Australian officer on receiving, in August, 1916, at Pozières, a confusing message.)

Slang is language which takes off its coat, spits on its hands,—and goes to work.—Carl Sandberg.

CHAPTER I
SLANG: DEFINITION, ETYMOLOGY, SYNONYMS, RANGE

Slang is easy enough to use, but very hard to write about with the facile convincingness that a subject apparently so simple would, at first sight, seem to demand. But the simplest things are often the hardest to define, certainly the hardest to discuss, for it is usually at first sight only that their simplicity is what strikes one the most forcibly. And slang, after all, " is a peculiar kind of vagabond language, always hanging on the outskirts of legitimate speech, but continually straying or forcing its way into the most respectable company." ¹ Circumstance conspires to complicate the issue, for—as we read in the Encyclopaedia Britannica—" at one moment a word or locution may be felt definitely as slang, but in another set of circumstances the same word or locution may not produce this impression at all."

In the Oxford English Dictionary, that monumentum are perennius which is almost insolently cheap for the large amount of " brass " that it costs to buy, Sir William Craigie gives four separate headings to slang, and this is for the noun alone. He implies that these headings probably represent four separate groups and origins but adds that, in the one strictly relevant class, " some of the senses may represent independent words "; on the other hand he does not rule out the possibility that certain of the many senses of slang may be interrelated either etymologically or semantically. The five senses approximating to that in general use since about 1850—to the free and easy, " shirtsleeves," essentially spoken language with which we are concerned —are Cant (i.e., thieves' slang), other very low and vulgar speech, the jargon of a trade or profession, abuse or impertinence, and—as in Foote's play, The Orators, 1762—humbug or nonsense. The Oxford definition of slang in our sense is, despite Professor G. H. McKnight's doubt " if an exact definition of slang is possible admirably clear: " 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." A rather different definition, which is also to some extent complementary, is that of Mr. H. W. Fowler: " the diction that results from the favourite game among the young and lively of playing with words and renaming things and actions; some invent new words, or mutilate or misapply the old, for the pleasure of novelty, and others catch up such words for the pleasure of being in the fashion." In this specific sense—as indeed in that of a vocational jargon—slang is not recorded before the early nineteenth century; as meaning cant, whether noun or adjective, it occurs about 1750. The etymology of slang—that prize-problem word—is dubious, for whereas the Oxford Dictionary¹ considers any connexion with certain Norwegian forms in -sleng to be unlikely, Dr. Bradley and Professors Weekley and Wyld ² think that cognates are furnished by slenja-ord, a new slang word, by slenja-namm, a nickname, and slenja-kjeften, to sling the jaw, i.e., to abuse. The " sling " sense gains probability from two sides: the O.E.D.'s quotation, dated about 1400,

But Eneas be war he abyes
The bolde wordes that [he] dede sclyng;

and low colloquial ³ usage. The latter has sling language or words, to talk, and sling the bat, to speak the vernacular, especially to speak the language of that foreign country (the Tommy in 1914-18 often used it for " to speak French, Arabic ") where one happens to be; but, although with both of these we should certainly compare the even more highly colloquial sling off at, to taunt, to jeer at a person, which approximates to the less familiar slang,⁴ to scold, to address very abusively, we must not allow ourselves to be will-o'-the-wisped into taking any notice of spin the bat, which, popular with the Tommies in India during the nineteenth century, represents a deliberate variant of sling the bat, but has a rather different meaning—to speak with great gusto, considerable vividness, and remarkable vigour—obviously analogous to spin a yarn, to tell a story. We can, however, indulge ourselves to the extent of finding the theatrical use, in the 'eighties, of slanging to mean singing, relevant to our purpose, for singing in music halls was so called because of the quantity of spoken slang inserted—often by way of a " gag " —between the verses of a song.

Slang has, from about 1850, been the accepted term for " illegitimate " colloquial speech; but even since then, especially among the lower classes, lingo has been a synonym, and so also, chiefly among the cultured and the pretentious, has argot. Now argot, being merely the French for slang, has no business to be used thus—it can rightly be applied only to French slang or French cant: and lingo properly means a simplified language that, like Beach-la-Mar and Pidgin-English, represents the distortion of (say) English by coloured peoples speaking English indeed but adapting it to their own phonetics and grammar. Jargon, originally—as in Chaucer—used of the warbling of birds,¹ has long been employed loosely and synonymously for slang, but it should be reserved for the technicalities of science, the professions, and the trades: though, for such technicalities, shop is an equally good word. An earlier synonym is flash, which did duty from 1718 until 1850 or so, but even in the eighteenth century it was more generally and correctly applied to the slang of criminals (i.e., cant), not to slang in our wider sense. Before 1850, slang meant all definitely vulgar language except cant, or at least this was its prevailing acceptation after 1800, before which (as Grose's invaluable dictionary shows) it served as an alternative to flash in the sense of cant. Nor, after 1850, was slang accepted with general good grace, for in 1873, we find Hotten protesting against the restriction of the term to " those lowest words only which are used by the dangerous classes and the lowest grades of society As slang is used by every class, and as this fact is now everywhere recognized, the stigma once attached to the word has long since been removed; in 1911, indeed, a foreign research-student at Cambridge could rightly say: " It is impossible to acquire a thorough knowledge of English [or of any other language, for that matter] without being familiar with slang and vulgarism. Whoever is uninitiated . . . will be at a loss to understand many of the masterpieces of English literature. Nay ... he will scarcely be able even to understand an English newspaper." ²

¹ Greenough and Kittredge, Words and their Ways in English Speech, 1902. (An excellent, very readable book.)

¹ After this, referred to as O.E.D. The debt to the O.E.D., in my second and third paragraphs, is too obvious to be laboured.

² In future references, Weekley, Wyld So with other authorities.

³ Hotten, whose evidence from Crabb's Gipsies' Advocate, 1831, I find unsupported elsewhere, asserts that slang is pure Gipsy, whereas it was merely adopted by the Gipsies. Another theory is that slang is an argotic corruption of the Fr. langue, language; too ingenious!

⁴ Dating, in this sense, from about 1840; sling off at from about 1880. Slang, to speak in slang, is first recorded in Lytton's Pelham, 1828.

¹ Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 1921; a happy hunting-ground for the etymologizing brave.

² Olof E. Bosson, Slang and Cant in Jerome K. Jerome's Works, 1911.

CHAPTER II
ORGIN, USES, AND REASONS FOR USE; ATTITUDES TOWARDS SLANG

Slang, being the quintessence of colloquial speech, must always be related to convenience rather than to scientific laws, grammatical rules and philosophical ideals. As it originates, so it flourishes best, in colloquial speech. " Among the impulses which lead to the invention of slang," Dr. Bradley remarked some years ago, "the two most important seem to be the desire to secure increased vivacity and the desire to secure increased sense of intimacy in the use of language." The most favourable conditions are those of " crowding and excitement, and artificial life. . . . Any sudden excitement or peculiar circumstance is quite sufficient to originate and set going a score of slang words", as John Camden Hotten, a publisher and lexicographer, more sinned against than sinning, noted in the excellent Short History that prefaces his valuable collection of mid-Victorian and other slang. Its origin and usage are lit with interest if we remember one of the primary laws: slang is not used merely as a means of self-expression: it connotes personality: "its coinage and circulation comes rather from the wish of the individual to distinguish himself by oddity or grotesque humour."¹ Another aspect is presented by Mr. Earle Welby² when he says: " Some slang originates in an honourable discontent with the battered or bleached phrases in far too general use," this fresh slang being further described by him as " the plain man's poetry, the plain man's aspiration from penny plain to twopence coloured".

But the most interesting pronouncements on the origins and uses of slang are those of Mr. Mencken and M. Niceforo. The former is so illuminating that to paraphrase him were an impertinence. " What slang actually consists of," he says,³ " doesn't depend . . . upon intrinsic qualities, but upon the surrounding circumstances. It is the user that determines the matter, and particularly the user's habitual way of thinking. If he chooses words carefully, with a full understanding of their meaning and savour, then no word that he uses seriously will belong to slang, but if his speech is made up chiefly of terms poll-parroted, and he has no sense of their shades and limitations, then slang will bulk largely in his vocabulary. In its origin it is nearly always respectable [comparatively!]; it is devised, not by the stupid populace [what about the Cockneys?], but by individuals of wit and ingenuity; as Whitney says, it is a product of an 'exuberance of mental activity, and the natural delight of language-making'. But when its inventions happen to strike the popular fancy and are adopted by the mob, they are soon worn threadbare and so lose all piquancy and significance, and in Whitney's words, become 'incapable of expressing anything that is real'. This is the history of such slang phrases as . . . 'How's your poor feet?' . . . 'Have a heart! ', 'This is the life '."

M. Alfredo Niceforo, a widely travelled Italian, notes that, as in general speech, so inevitably in slang, one speaks as one judges—and one judges according to how one feels. His opinions on this subject, together with its relation to the influence of groups, are of first-rate importance.¹ " Every social fact—and the language of a group is a social fact," writes Niceforo, " is the result of two classes of cause: personal (or biological) causes, represented by the physiological and psychological characteristics of the individual; and external (or mesologicai) causes, represented by the great accumulation of the social pressures, economic and geographical and other factors, which so powerfully influence mankind." He shows how language varies in passing from one social group to another and even in the different situations in which any one person may find himself. He indicates the further distinction that sometimes it is feeling or sentiment, sometimes one's profession or trade which determines the nature of one's speech, whether it be standard or unconventional. For instance, children and lunatics speak very much as their emotions dictate; soldiers have a multitude of words and phrases that reflect their daily existence in barracks, on the march, in bivouac, or in the front line. The specialization that characterizes every vocation leads naturally to a specialized vocabulary, to the invention of new words or the re-charging of old words. Such special words and phrases become slang only when they are used outside the vocational group and then only if they change their meaning or are applied in other ways. Motoring, aviation, and the wireless have already supplied us with a large number of slang terms. But, whatever the source, personality and one's surroundings (social or occupational) are the two co-efficients, the two chief factors, the determining causes of the nature of slang, as they are of language in general and of style.

Why is slang used at all? That question, like a small child's, is a natural one to ask, but a difficult one to answer. Reasons have occurred to the writer, who, however, is not quite so fatuous as to consider that they account for every slang expression used in the past, much less every slang expression that will be used by the bright lads, sprightly lasses, and naughty old m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Origianl Title Page
• Origianl Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: General Considerations
• Part II: A sketch of the History of English Slang
• Part III: Particular Aspects
• Part IV: American Slang
• Part V: Vocabularies
• Index of Theorists, Exponents, and Themes