Off topic: How slang evolves Thread poster: Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
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I apologise in advance to anyone who is sensitive to slang or curse words, but we are all adults and I found this article on the evolution of slang, published in the latest issue of The Economist, rather interesting.
“How language evolves
THE SULTANS OF SLANG
From “strangle-goose” to “skibidi”, colloquial dictionaries struggle to keep up
In the beginning was the word. But what was it? For Christians, it was the divine logos through w... See more I apologise in advance to anyone who is sensitive to slang or curse words, but we are all adults and I found this article on the evolution of slang, published in the latest issue of The Economist, rather interesting.
“How language evolves
THE SULTANS OF SLANG
From “strangle-goose” to “skibidi”, colloquial dictionaries struggle to keep up
In the beginning was the word. But what was it? For Christians, it was the divine logos through which God created the world. For the world’s leading expert on English slang, Jonathon Green, the first word is arse, or perhaps bollocks.
These are the oldest words for which there are citations in “Green’s Dictionary of Slang”. A thousand years ago, an Anglo-Saxon monk translated the Latin word nates as ears-lyre: the first written appearance of “arse” in English. Another Anglo-Saxon glossary-maker noted that the Latin testiculi was, in the local parlance, beallucas.
The English have been talking bollocks for at least a millennium.
In many languages, the most common slang words concern body parts, sex, money and intoxicating substances. Yet Mr Green does not think slang is trivial. In 2010 his dictionary came out in a door-stopping three-volume hardback edition. Since then, it has lived online (and free). It has expanded with new words, new meanings and new earliest-known citations. Mr Green says he finds a new one at least every couple of weeks.
One purpose of slang has always been to baffle outsiders. The best-known example may be Cockney rhyming slang, which was devised in the 19th century to confuse the police. But there are plenty of others. The first books on slang were “beggar books”. In the middle-ages the destitute relied on Christian charity. That led some chancers to try various wheezes to seem needier than they were—and chroniclers like Robert Copland to decode their insider cant. His book of the 1530s, “Highway to the Spital-House”, reveals that a clewner is a high-ranking villain, and the dance is a hanging. Bouse makes an appearance—another of the oldest slang words that is still in robust use today, says Mr Green, though it is now spelled booze.
The first true attempt to make a slang dictionary came shortly after Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary of standard English. In 1785 Francis Grose, a former militia captain so fat it was said he had to be tied to his bed to stop him rolling off, published the “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue”, compiled by prowling London’s seedy neighbourhoods and jotting down gems such as strangle-goose for a poulterer.
Vulgar meant “common”, not “rude”, but slang allowed people to get round taboos. In Grose’s era the old names for the body parts had become unmentionable, with comically prudish results. In his slang dictionary bottomless pit is defined only as “the monosyllable”; look under venerable monosyllable and you find pudendum muliebre. This is Latin for a “woman’s shameful thing”, an astonishingly prissy circumlocution. Chaucer, writing four centuries earlier, would just have said “queynte”.
A common slang can bind groups together, as Eric Partridge showed by collecting soldiers’ vocabulary from the first world war. His intent was not to portray the men “as supermen or as whiners”, but as they were. Bored then suddenly terrified, soldiers used ironic detachment to deal with constant peril. Pip squeak and whizz bang were different kinds of shells for the sounds they made; a toothpick was a bayonet. As Blighty was England, a Blighty one was a wound serious enough to send the soldier home. To be a loaf of bread, a poignant example of rhyming slang, was to be dead.
Partridge, whose most ambitious work was a “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” in 1937, was inspired by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). This mighty tome did not just say what a word meant, but also where it came from and what it had meant at every stage of its past, backed by written evidence.
LEX, DRUGS AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
The OED was made by a team of scholars; Partridge had to rely on volunteer helpers, sending in proposed etymologies from their own areas of expertise (the Boer war, the merchant marine, and so on). He could not possibly verify everything he was told. He could not decide between several origin stories for OK, and so listed them all. (It comes from oll korrekt, a jocular American misspelling of “all correct”.) For Johnson used to mean “penis”, he gives the preposterous explanation that perhaps it came from Doctor Johnson, because “There was no one that Dr Johnson was not prepared to stand up to.”
For a young Mr Green, Partridge was a challenge to do better: “He can’t do sex, he can’t do drugs, and he can’t do rock ’n’ roll.” Partridge apologises for including sexual terms. Not so Mr Green, who came up through the 1960s counterculture. After Oxford he worked in underground magazines, even for a short time in “top-shelf” (that is, pornographic) ones.
In the late 1990s an inheritance and a publisher’s commission allowed Mr Green to dedicate himself completely to his magnum opus. When it was published in 2010, a reviewer called it “the best historical dictionary of English slang there is, ever has been or (in print at least) is ever likely to be".
Today many publishers see the dictionary’s ideal format not as a bound volume, out of date by the time it hits the shelves, but as a database that is constantly updated. That is what Mr Green has continued to do from his home office in Marseille. Like Partridge, he is a one-man band with occasional collaborators, volunteers who send him citations from their own reading.
During The Economist’s visit this year, he was taking into his dictionary new words and citations. One volunteer sends in slang culled from the papers of a 19th-century politician, such as rum touch for an eccentric, or Cyprian for a prostitute. Mr Green expands his lexis of gay terms by drawing on the work of Gary Simes, an Australian scholar who died before completing a dictionary of sexuality and slang. This includes a first citation for bone queen, a fellator. He works with James Lambert, another Australian academic, “who will take over when I pop my clogs”, Mr Green says.
It is not clear what the job of slang lexicographer will look like in the future. Technology allows a quicker, more accurate search for citations; but it also makes language harder to pin down. Social-media diffusion means that the half-life of a new term is shorter than ever before. Words race from the avant-garde, to a broader set of cool kids, to mainstream society and finally death when mum and dad start using them, all in a matter of months.
And there is more slang on display than ever before. Countless subcultures generate their own patois. Tony Thorne of King’s College London has collected the slang of gangs and of drill-music lyrics (such as matic for a gun, or nank for “to stab”). His sources are people who know each subculture well. But developing such sources is hard. They may mislead, unintentionally or intentionally, since slang is supposed to be unclear to the outsider. He recalls the time he told a radio audience that smh stood for “same here”. It doesn’t—it means “shaking my head”—but he had been duped by mischievous students.
Social-media influencers are keen to propagate their own new words, such as skibidi, a near-meaningless, briefly ubiquitous term that emerged from a series of videos about talking toilets. Such coinages are “designed to be transient”; by the time lexicographers catch them they could be gone.
Everyone with an internet connection now has access to all the world’s slang. The English-speaking nations have different styles. Mr Green gives the Australians top marks for creativity. Coinages introduced to Britain by Barry Humphries, a comedian, include technicolour yawn (vomit) and siphon the python (to urinate). Mr Thorne by contrast describes the particularly English native style: constantly teasing, terrified of self-seriousness, addicted to playful nonsense-sounds (rumpy-pumpy, naff, cream-crackered). Plenty of Britishisms have caught on in America, where locals sometimes underestimate how rude they are (shag, wanker). Slang—quintessentially insider language—is more global now than it ever was.
For all its richness, many equate slang with language thoughtlessly spoken by those who haven’t mastered the standard language. But Michael Adams of the University of Indiana insists that slang is not a bad copy of the standard language; rather “People have got other stuff to say, and the language they’re given doesn’t meet their expressive needs.” He’s a fan of the word delulu, which may have the same literal meaning as delusional but carries a humorous shrug that delusional doesn’t.
Slang is not only not less than “real” language. Arguably it is more. Many words in a standard dictionary have only specific, referential meanings; “lanthanum” points to a chemical element but doesn’t say much else. Slang words may refer to a much smaller range of things. But they also carry other channels of meaning: who the speaker is (a Gen-Z TikToker, a Cockney), how they see the thing they are describing (with affection, fear, desire or contempt), and even how they want to be seen themselves. Says Mr Adams: “It’s when the fountain of language overflows with meaning.”
By the way, I never use swear words in Portuguese, I use French instead, because for me, they don't carry the same weight. I wonder if this is also the case for other people who have lived abroad for many years.
In any case, Happy New Year to everyone, with or without slang...
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| | | | | Slang versus jargon | Jan 1 |
Interesting article, Maria Teresa - thanks.
So, class, what's the difference between slang and jargon?
Discuss.
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Happy New Year!
To start the discussion, I’ll say that jargon is a specialized set of terms for a specific group. When I was working at the EU, I had to learn the Community jargon, but I wonder what would have happened to me if I ever used slang in a EU translation…
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:40
Italian to English
Philip Lees wrote:
Interesting article, Maria Teresa - thanks.
So, class, what's the difference between slang and jargon?
Discuss.
Jargon: the specialist language used within any profession or trade.
Slang: common talk used by everyone, often within specific social groups.
I have to skedaddle now, so TTFN and CU L8r. Splitsville!
[Edited at 2026-01-01 16:23 GMT]
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| Jargon versus slang | Jan 3 |
So slang and jargon are both specialised subsets of language, but one is associated with a social group and the other with a professional group. Right?
We could say that jargon is professional slang, and slang is social jargon. Each is a means of helping people identify with their particular group.
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:40
Italian to English
| Translators' jargon | Jan 3 |
Jargon used by translators:
Back translation
MT
CAT tool
Transcreation
Localisation
Post-editing
etc
etc
| | | | Daryo
Local time: 16:40
Serbian to English
+ ...
Tom in London wrote:
Jargon used by translators:
Back translation
MT
CAT tool
Transcreation
Localisation
Post-editing
etc
etc
What about 'context' - apparently an unmentionable dirty word for too many 'pros'? Not to forget 'target audience' ... treated like some weird esoteric concept, usually by the same lot.
I wouldn't expect you to forget about these.
Rant curt short before it starts getting too long.
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:40
Italian to English
Daryo wrote:
I wouldn't expect you to forget about these.
I did say "etc., etc." So what were you expecting?
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