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The American Dialect Society

Is Slang a Word for Linguists?Author(s): Bethany K. Dumas and Jonathan LighterSource: American Speech, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Spring, 1978), pp. 5-17Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/455336 .

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IS SLANG A WORD FOR LINGUISTS?

BETHANY K. DUMAS AND JONATHAN LIGHTER

University of Tennessee-Knoxville

ALTHOUGH THE PHENOMENON has frequently been discussed, the term

SLANG has rarely been defined in a way that is useful to linguists.' Annoyance and frustration await anyone who searches the professional literature for a definition or even a conception of SLANG that can stand

up to scrutiny. Instead one finds impressionism, much of it of a dismay- ing kind.

Holding a distinctly minority view, S. I. Hayakawa (1941, pp. 194-95) has called slang "the poetry of everyday life" and said that it "vividly expresses people's feelings about life and about the things they en- counter in life." We doubt that many professors of literature would

accept such a statement, even if they recognized in it an echo of Walt Whitman (1885, p. 573), who, more than half a century earlier, had gone even further in his praise: "Slang, or indirection, [is] an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism, and express itself

illimitably, which in highest walks produces poets and poems, and doubt- less in pre-historic times gave the start to, and perfected, the whole immense tangle of the old mythologies.... Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in lan-

guage, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize."

Since neither writer defines the term, Hayakawa and Whitman each must have felt that a notion of SLANG would be clear to his readers. The same might be said of John C. Hodges, who observed far less charitably in several editions of the Harbrace College Handbook (for example, 1967, p. 197) that "slang is the sluggard's way of avoiding the search for the exact, meaningful word." Slang, by implication, is inexact and meaning- less, but these are characteristics it shares with much of standard English, as fifteen minutes at a water cooler or a political rally will show. Years before Hodges, Norman Foerster and J. M. Steadman, Jr. (1941, p. 290) sneered at slang as "a cheap substitute for good diction," which demon- strated "laziness in thought and poverty of vocabulary." They found it

necessary to remark that "to confine one's critical adjectives to swell and

lousy certainly does not indicate much critical ability." But to confine one's critical vocabulary to any two adjectives, no matter how sesquipeda- lian, does not indicate much critical ability either.

Similar but even more extreme dicta can be found, especially in the early part of this century. John F. Genung led the way when he claimed

5



6 AMERICAN SPEECH

in 1893 (p. 32) that "slang is to a people's language what an epidemic disease is to their bodily constitution; just as catching and just as inevi- table in its run.... Like a disease, too, it is severest where the sanitary conditions are most neglected." As one might expect, Genung never

actually defined slang, but he did give examples to be shunned, includ-

ing "He was badly cut up by the news" and "I am two dollars shy." The legend of the college student with only two adjectives to his name

is evidently an old one in pedagogical fakelore. In the midst of one of the bitterest antislang diatribes of all time, James C. Fernald, a Funk and

Wagnalls editor, revealed in 1918 (p. 248) that "it was said of a certain student in Harvard that he had but two adjectives--'stunning' for what- ever he approved, and 'beastly' for anything he disliked." Biadjectival semiliterates at Harvard! Where would it end? Fernald tells us. He

points out that "the noble Hebrew has become the degenerate Yiddish" and that "the Latin of conquering Rome ... has successors in some ways inferior in the Italian, French, and Spanish" (p. 238). A small sample can

give the savor of his incredible remarks, made at a time when English teachers might have been better occupied in making the language "safe for democracy":

The touch of decay is upon all things earthly. Frost, rain, and wind are casting down the mountains, and the rivers are washing the rock-dust far out into the sea.... Language shares the same tendency to decay.... Our schools and col- leges have constantly to correct this tendency, which, but for them, would be overmastering....

Slang, for the most part, comes up from the coarse and more ignorant portion of the community. Reading but few books, and those usually of no literary merit, they have nothing to hold them up to high standards of speech.... Even words and phrases once excellent in meaning come to express some idea of the saloon or the gutter. If these expressions are vigorous, they quickly become current, for feeble, lethargic, and uninventive minds are glad to be caught up and carried along by those of more originality and force, who are yet not too far above their own grade. Thus some word or phrase... will go down street after street, through whole sections of a city. The low theaters catch it up, the saloons pass it over the bar, the yellow journals print it, business men who deal with the rough element adopt it, children learn it from their playmates....

Slang ... saves the trouble-and the glory-of thinking. The same cheap word or phrase may be used for any one of a hundred ideas.... Slang is the adver- tisement of mental poverty....

The stir of the lower life is constantly bringing to the surface mud [and] slime. [pp. 238, 247-48, 253]

This is a far cry from Whitman's "wholesome fermentation," and

sounds more like a cholera epidemic. No definition of slang is offered, but it obviously has something to do with degeneration. We might com-



IS SLANG A WORD FOR LINGUISTS? 7

pare Fernald's horrific vision with the medical opinion of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who suggested that "the use of slang is at once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy" (cited by Partridge 1935, p. 295). This observation at least makes more sense than the following, taken from a current freshman handbook (Leggett, Mead, and Charvat 1974, p. 353): "It is especially poor usage to mix slang and respectable words indis-

criminately in the same sentence." Thus, "Crazy, daddy-o!" may be poor usage, but presumably "Let's go to the flicks tonight" is worse because some of its words are respectable.

In his widely reprinted preface to the Dictionary of American Slang, Stuart Berg Flexner has attempted what seems at first to be a more

systematic approach: "American slang.., is the body of words and ex-

pressions frequently used by or intelligible to a rather large portion of the general American public, but not accepted as good, formal usage by the majority" (Wentworth and Flexner 1960, p. vi). Though the at-

tempted objectivity is refreshing, everything is slang by this definition

except formal usage and words and expressions of limited currency. It is

typical of Flexner's approach (set forth in greater detail in his article in the 1971 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) that his dictionary of

slang, compiled with the late Harold B. Wentworth, contains entries such as A-bomb, bikini, garrison state, and lagniappe, items that we feel have little in common with words like chick and junkie, though the status of even the last two is questionable.

Other writers have defined slang as a function of time. H. A. Gleason

(1961, p. 6), for instance, regards it as merely "that portion of the vocab-

ulary which changes most freely." This characterization overlooks the fact that novelty in a locution is apparent rather than real newness. An

example is out of sight meaning 'excellent,' first recorded in Stephen Crane's Maggie in 1893, but still "novel" in 1970. Some "four-letter words" are thought by those college students who use them the most to be twentieth-century inventions; in 1971 a New York University coed

suggested, on the basis of the author's sexual vocabulary, that the erotic Victorian My Secret Life was a 1960s spoof. In the face of such a mish- mash of romanticism, prescriptivism, confusion, and naivete, it is no wonder William Labov (1972, p. 97) has suggested that all articles on

slang should be consigned to "an outer, extra-linguistic darkness." The OED defines SLANG (sb. 3, sense lc) as "language of a highly col-

loquial 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." This is not very helpful. What is "highly colloquial"? What is "standard educated speech"? This definition does not identify



8 AMERICAN SPEECH

any special category called SLANG, though it well describes the language so strongly albeit vaguely opposed by the writers of handbooks. The definition in Webster's Third (sense 2) is fuller, identifying slang as "a nonstandard vocabulary composed of words and senses characterized

primarily by connotations of extreme informality and usu. a currency not limited to a particular region and composed typically of coinages or

arbitrarily changed words, clipped or shortened forms, extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech, or verbal novelties usu. experienc- ing quick popularity and relatively rapid decline into disuse." Though admirable in its attempt at precision, this definition is not very satisfac-

tory for technical use either. Like the OED, Merriam-Webster stresses extrinsic features such as slang's geographical distribution and its "rapid decline into disuse." But such features are not self-evident. Perhaps the frankest statement on the subject is the explanatory note in Webster's Third (p. 19a/1) that "there is no completely satisfactory objective test for

slang, especially in application to a word out of context. No word is

invariably slang, and many standard words can be given slang connotations or used so inappropriately as to become slang." This statement

emphasizes that connotation is in some way a primary determinant of

slang. In practice, lexicographers are often at odds about which terms should

bear the SLANG label. Webster's Third, published in 1961 with 450,000 entries, calls only 24 entries beginning with the letter W "slang." In Webster's New World Dictionary, a desk volume with fewer than a third of the entries in Webster's Third and published nine years later, 81 entries

beginning with W are "slang." To Webster's New World, chick in the sense

'young woman' is slang; to Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, it is not. To the Collegiate, junkie is slang, but to the Random House Dictionary it is not. The American Heritage Dictionary considers both terms to be slang. Not

only individual but corporate perceptions of what terms are slang vary considerably. The lack of consistency in dictionary definitions and label-

ing practices may be partly responsible for the fact that articles in journals do not, for the most part, attempt a definition of the subject. Typi- cally, authors of articles in publications such as American Speech and Col-

lege English assume that they, their readers, and their informants are by and large referring to the same thing when they speak of SLANG. Dundes and Schonhorn, for instance, in their 1963 study of Kansas University slang, elicited data simply by asking students to give slang equivalents for words and phrases. And Olesen and Whittaker, in a 1968 article called "Conditions under Which College Students Borrow, Use, and Alter Slang" (p. 222), had only this to say about the nature of slang: "A central




attribute of slang, most writers agree, is the rapidly changing character of those new words, old words with new meanings, and half words that come to be thought of as belonging to this category of language."

Semanticists are not of much help either. We quoted Hayakawa earlier, and Rapoport (1975, p. 144) tells us that "slang is essentially a collection of vivid metaphors in the speech of the less educated who, as a rule, do not write. Whether these 'non-literary' metaphors enter the 'standard' language depends on whether they reflect a genuine expressive need or merely strive for novelty. The latter case is exemplified in

passing-fad expressions, especially among teen-age groups." Slang that fills a need, Rapoport continues, "enter[s] the language identified as

slang but with a permanent place assured. Examples: guy, O.K., broke, flush, dumb, buck, big shot." This description sounds very sensible (except for the dubious notion that the less educated do not write). But do the cited examples in fact fill "a genuine expressive need"? Their prede- cessors in American speech must have been no less vivid to those who

grew up using them. Why is guy more expressive than bloke, chap, or even

fella? The OEDS (s.v. break, 11) indicates that broke in the sense 'ruined financially' was unremarkable usage in the seventeenth century. It has remained, but is it any catchier than the last century's hard up or up against it? What makes the word booze vivid? How does OK compare with the older bang-up or the newer cool? Is bigshot better than bigbug? Simi-

larly, all of Rapoport's examples have current synonyms. In short, the

supposition that an expressive slang term will remain "in the language" has never been proved, nor has it been proved that limp slang quickly dies out: even as an abbreviation of oll korrect, OK does not seem very dynamic.

The state of slang seems to be this: we are all sure it exists, most of us are sure we know what it is, and many of us are sure that everyone else

agrees with us. That the last assumption is not true was strongly suggested by a project Lighter designed to examine the question, What do college students think is slang? He discovered that there is little or no

agreement when, in 1975, he gave the following sentences to students at the University of Tennessee, with the directions: "Underline all words that you think are slang. Don't look in a dictionary."

1. I don't reckon so. 2. Where's daddy? 3. Get lost, kid. 4. A bunch of us guys were hanging out on the corner. 5. Sounds like a wild goose chase to me. 6. She's a good-lookin' chick.



10 AMERICAN SPEECH

7. Hi yo, Silver! 8. They were hauling water in metal buckets. 9. A junkie is somebody on drugs.

10. I'm late for math. 11. Bill ain't here. 12. Get back, Superman! That's kryptonite! 13. Just between you and I, it's a terrific deal. 14. Joe got fired. He was expendable. 15. Tomorrow's the Super Bowl. 16. Call a cop! 17. Some folks call skeeter-hawks "dragon-flies." 18. He fell flat on his ass. 19. How 'bout a hot dog? 20. I'll get you, you kwazy wabbit!

To students majoring in language-related fields (English, English Edu- cation, Spanish, and German) slang consisted of a very few nonstandard items, for example, chick (sentence 6). To those majoring in other fields

(history, psychology, computer science, mathematics, business adminis- tration, engineering, urban planning, special education, philosophy, social work), it consisted of many items that are merely not formal English, for example, on drugs (9), math (10), deal (13),fired (14),folks (17), and

flat (18). Many students identified reckon (1), ain't (11), skeeter-hawks (17), wild-goose chase (5) and ass (18) as slang. The comments of some graduate students in English were surprising. "Cop can't be slang," said one woman, "because it's been replaced by fuzz and pig." "I say reckon all the time, but I know it's slang-not that there's anything wrong with slang." One man claimed there were plenty of colloquialisms on the question- naire, but no slang at all. Freshmen tended to underline many unex-

pected things, including contractions. The confusion is probably nationwide. A senior classics major at NYU gave as an example of slang "the use of presently to mean currently even though it's never meant that." At a slightly more pragmatic level, another NYU student said in 1973, "Well, there's good English, and slang is everything else." One of the

cliches of the subject is that anyone can recognize slang, but no one can define it. The reverse may be closer to the truth.

It was our awareness of the kinds of discrepancies noted above that led us to wonder whether slang is identifiable at all and whether the term can be useful for the linguist. It is obviously useful for the nonspecialist who employs it to name that which he thinks is not good formal English. This is the way Flexner has used the term; but, if SLANG is to have such a

vague meaning, linguists might be better off discarding it altogether. Yet we feel that the label can indeed be used in a restricted sense and must be

retained if we are adequately to describe a certain kind of lexical item.




The full but usually disappointing body of literature on slang includes

three or four notably acute treatments of the nature of slang. The ear- liest points the way. It appears in chapter 11 of George Eliot's

Middlemarch, first published in 1871. As Rosamond and her mother dis-

cuss the young men of Middlemarch, Rosamond insists that she has no intention of marrying any of them:

"So it seems, my love, [says her mother] for you have as good as refused the pick of them; and if there's better to be had, I'm sure there's no girl better deserves it."

"Excuse me, mamma-I wish you would not say, 'the pick of them.'... it is rather a vulgar expression."

"Very likely, my dear; I never was a good speaker. What should I say?" "The best of them." "Why that seems just as plain and common. If I had had time to think, I should

have said, 'the most superior young men.' But with your education you must know."

"What must Rosy know, mother?" said Mr Fred, who had slid in unob- served....

"Whether it's right to say 'superior young men,' ' said Mrs Vincy, ringing the bell.

"Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now. Superior is getting to be

shopkeepers' slang." "Are you beginning to dislike slang then?" said Rosamond, with mild gravity. "Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class." "There is correct English: that is not slang." "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and

essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets." "You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point." "Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter." "Of course you can call it poetry if you like." "Aha, Miss Rosy, you don't know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new

game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you to

separate." [pp. 73-74]

If we assume that Mr. Fred's perceptions are shared by astute persons, it is clear that while we all share an assumption that there is a lexical

category of slang, we differ widely in our assumptions about what items

belong in that category. Must we be content to say that slang exists only in the mind of the hearer? Unless we can devise an objective method for

identifying slang as a real verbal class, we must allow that the editors of

Webster's Third had the last word when they lamented the lack of an

objective test for it. But Henry Bradley's article in the eleventh edition of

the Encyclopedia Britannica suggests that a reasonably objective test is indeed possible. Without formulating such a test, Bradley (1911, p. 207)

recognizes that the speaker's intention is important in identifying slang



12 AMERICAN SPEECH

and also that slang is "neither a part of the ordinary language, nor an

attempt to supply its deficiencies." He further distinguishes slang from those words "which are proscribed from the intercourse of reputable society because they express too plainly ideas that are deemed indelicate, or because they are brutally insulting" (p. 208). Although we feel Brad-

ley may be mistaken in his exclusion of such words from SLANG, his

general discussion of the subject, written 65 years ago, has yet to be

improved on.

Speaker intent is crucial in dealing with slang, partly because it seems to lie at the heart of the warnings by English teachers who penalize their students for using slang. Milton Millhauser (1952, p. 309) gives an un-

usually honest presentation of this rationale in "The Case against Slang," which maintains that we should tell our students: "Slang is a kind of

speech that belittles what it conveys. It was developed to express a few

widely prevalent attitudes and therefore lacks precision and variety. You should avoid it because it is inadequate to critical thinking and because it

imposes a cynical or flippant tone on your serious ideas." There is some truth in that statement, but a corrective and insightful

comment on some of the real reasons for such pedagogic antipathy to

slang is this passage from James Sledd's essay "On Not Teaching English Usage" (1965, p. 699):

When a teacher warns his students against slang, he re-affirms his allegiance to the social order that created him. Typically, slang is a para-code, a system of substitutes for statusful expressions which are used by people who lack conventional status and do not conduct the important affairs of established com- munities. Slang flourishes in the semantic areas of sex, drinking, narcotics, rac- ing, athletics, popular music, and other crime-a "liberal" language of things done as ends in themselves by gentlemen who are not gentlemen and dislike gentility. Genteel pedagogues must naturally oppose it, precisely because slang serves the outs as a weapon against the ins. To use slang is to deny allegiance to the existing order, either jokingly or in earnest, by refusing even the words which represent convention and signal status; and those who are paid to preserve the status quo are prompted to repress slang as they are prompted to repress any other symbol of potential revolution.

Sledd has put his finger on the most crucial feature of slang: it is used

deliberately, in jest or in earnest, to flout a conventional social or semantic norm. Since norms differ, some lexemes will vary in status, tempo- rally or socially. "Today's slang, tomorrow's standard English" runs the

cliche, and vice versa. Once this feature is understood, SLANG must be

distinguished from JARGON. The confusion of the two is long-standing (it

appears in Eliot's passage quoted above, in the comment on superior) and typifies such discussions of slang as Kenyon's "Cultural Levels and




Functional Varieties of English" (1948), which includes three senses of the word SLANG. Kenyon first claims that the label implies a cultural level: "Among cultural levels may be included, on the lower levels, illit- erate speech, narrowly local dialect, ungrammatical writing, excessive and unskillful slang, slovenly and careless vocabulary" (p. 31). Later he confuses slang and popular catch-phrases, then slang and jargon: "The third level... is a cultural one: 'the latest slang,' workmen's 'technical

slang and colloquialisms which other persons cannot comprehend."' Part of Kenyon's statement is borrowed from Arthur G. Kennedy's earlier Current English (1935, pp. 15-17). A technical term that is used solely to designate-regardless of its etymology or the social status of those who use the term-is jargon, not slang. Slang characterizes a referent; jargon and standard English only indicate it. Even more important: if the speaker belongs to a low-status group, a term that is merely indica- tive for him may still be perceived as slang by someone of higher conventional status. Such misinterpretations are probably common.

Considered in the light of what has already been said, the description of slang in the American Heritage Dictionary (1969, p. xlvi) is especially noteworthy:

The label Slang indicates a style of language rather than a level of formality or cultivation. The distinguishing feature of slang as understood in the Dictionary is the intention-however often unsuccessful-to produce rhetorical effect, such as incongruity, irreverence, or exaggeration.... A word that is strictly de- notative... is not slang. Slang always has strong connotations in addition to its denotation.... Its connotation is intentionally, often aggressively, informal.

True slang must be distinguished from the lay concept of slang as a

grab bag of odd usages. The layman applies the term imprecisely to a

large body of lexemes including true slang, jargon, regionalisms, and

colloquialisms, which are vaguely perceived as slang by such groups as

college students. Using the word in this broad sense leads inevitably to confusion. Rather than continue to use the term in that way, serious

linguists should abandon it entirely, for such use can lead only to misun-

derstanding. There is, however, an indispensible use for the term SLANG to name a

body of lexemes that are distinct from standard English, jargon, and all other kinds of informal uses such as regionalisms and colloquialisms and which are identifiable primarily by the intent (or the perceived intent) of the speaker or writer to break with established linguistic convention. In order to understand WHAT slang is, we might also consider WHO uses slang. As Sledd intimated, others react to users of slang because of what

they tell about themselves and their degree of social responsibility.



14 AMERICAN SPEECH

There have been some previous attempts to tell students how to decide whether a given word is slang, by specifying criteria for the class. These

attempts, however, are not precisely formulated, as this example (Meyers 1974, p. 370) illustrates: "Is there some corresponding term that is unquestionably in general use? Would the term's use by a faculty member or public official sound strained, foolish, or condescending? Does the mere use of the term help you to identify the speaker as a member of a particular group? The word is probably slang if the answer to all these is yes." We have devised a preliminary attempt at a more

precise set of features with the hope that others will clarify or dispute our method. We consider that an expression should be regarded as true

slang if it meets at least two of the following criteria. 1. Its presence will markedly lower, at least for the moment, the dig-

nity of formal or serious speech or writing. This does not mean that the term has actually been discovered in such contexts. It does mean, however, that an individual who has some familiarity with the expression will not expect to find it in the midst of a serious discourse in otherwise standard English except for one special rhetorical effect: to signal that the speaker or writer is deliberately being undignified or intimate with his audience. If there seems to be no reason to expect this effect, the

expression will appear to a sensitive audience as a glaring misuse of

register (or, as we prefer to call it, situational dialect). There are words in the following artificial examples which, given the tone of the complete utterance, are highly incongruous:

The Federal government spends nearly one hundred billion bucks annually for defense.

Few would question Whitman's position as one of America's grooviest poets. Though their dissent was not always noisy or dramatic, many Americans

felt the President was a jerk for continuing the war.

2. Its use implies the user's special familiarity either with the referent or with that less statusful or less responsible class of people who have such special familiarity and use the term. This "special familiarity" usu-

ally implies disdain for what is conventionally accepted or esteemed, or an overfamiliarity with what the dominant society finds unseemly or

unacceptable. We generally learn neutral terms first, disdainful or "in" terms later. Even if by chance we learn one of the latter sort first, we soon discover that the referent has another name that is more appro- priate for formal use. These examples should again be self-evident:

College students in the 1960s blew more grass than ever before. Patton had said the same thing back when he was a chicken colonel.




Today was a bummer. Joe Valachi had decided to sing.

3. It is a tabooed term in ordinary discourse with persons of higher social status or greater responsibility. On occasion, of course, normal taboos do not apply, but once again we are speaking of the norm of verbal behavior. At the present time this category includes all of our nonlatinate sexual and scatological terms with the exception of nursery euphemisms. In other eras and in other cultures the sexual terms may be much less tabooed than, for example, profane reference to the Deity. Because the deliberate use of taboo language in the presence of someone of higher social standing is a form of linguistic defiance, such terms are

functionally similar to those that fit the first criterion.2 They usually fit the second criterion as well. Though the name has been changed, the first example is a real quotation from a college classroom. The offending student was ejected:

Professor Smith, would you repeat those last three fuckers? I'd like this job, sir, because the one I have now is shit. Bullshit, your honor.

4. It is used in place of the well-known conventional synonym, especially in order (a) to protect the user from the discomfort caused by the conventional item or (b) to protect the user from the discomfort or

annoyance of further elaboration. Ordinary euphemisms protect the audience as well as the user, but items in this category are employed solely to protect the speaker or writer, sometimes at the expense of the listener or reader. These expressions are used deliberately but their

quasi-euphemistic function is not always at a conscious level. Examples:

"What should we do with the prisoners, Lieutenant?" "Waste 'em." His uncle croaked. How was the movie? Super! Oh, baby, I really dig you.

The examples given for the four criteria can be categorized as follows, each meeting at least two criteria and thus qualifying as slang: buck (1, 2); groovy (1, 2, 4b); jerk (1, 2, 4b); blow grass (1, 2); chicken colonel (1, 2); bummer (1, 2, 4b); sing (1, 2);fuckers (1, 2, 3); shit (1, 2, 3, possibly 4b); bullshit (1, 2, 3, possibly 4b); waste (1, 2, 4a); croak (1, 4a); super (1, 4b); dig (1, 2, 4a). Baby is a borderline case; several dictionaries call it slang, but it seems to fit with certainty only criterion 1.

Some readers may object that we have used a form of specious reason- ing: convinced that slang exists, we have devised ad hoc attributes for it.



16 AMERICAN SPEECH

To such critics we would reply that, as native speakers of English (from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line as well as the Mississippi), our recog- nition of the existence of a special kind of informal lexeme has been basic to our linguistic behavior for as long as we have been competent speakers. There has been general agreement that "slang" exists in some form or other (the broad lay sense of the term), but those special lexemes we have been discussing have not been systematically separated. What makes them special? In short, their undeniable lack of dignity and their deliberate, widespread use within a social group (or many social groups) to defy social or linguistic convention. All four of the criteria we have

suggested for identifying slang reflect some aspect of this rebellion or deliberate lack of dignity. Although we are not yet ready to claim that criterion 1 must be one of the two criteria met by all slang, it is difficult to conceive of an expression that fits numbers 2 and 3, 2 and 4, or 3 and 4 without also fitting the first criterion. Conversely, ordinary dialect, col-

loquialisms, jargon, and standard English may fit any one of the criteria or none of them but never two or more. When something fits at least two of the criteria, a linguistically sensitive audience will react to it in a certain way. This reaction, which cannot be measured, is the ultimate

identifying characteristic of true slang.

NOTES

1. This is a modified version of a paper presented 29 December 1975 at the American Dialect Society meeting in San Francisco. The authors wish to ac- knowledge the help of Charles Hargis, Michael Johnson, and Peyton Todd of the University of Tennessee; they provided useful questions and commentary during the paper's gestation.

2. It may be that taboo terms form a group which is logically akin to, yet separate from, true slang, since many taboo terms are the only ones available to nonacademic speakers. A taboo term is not necessarily sexual: nigger is the obvi- ous example.

REFERENCES

Bradley, Henry. 1911. "Slang." In Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1 1th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Dundes, Alan, and Schonhorn, Manuel R. 1963. "Kansas University Slang: A New Generation." American Speech 38: 163-77.

Eliot, George. 1871-72. Middlemarch. Edited by G. S. Haight. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

Fernald, James C. 1918. Expressive English, 2d ed. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Flexner, Stuart Berg. 1971. "Slang." In Encyclopedia Britannica. Chicago: Ency-

clopaedia Britannica.




Foerster, Norman, and Steadman, J. M., Jr. 1941. Writing and Thinking: A Hand- book of Composition and Revision, rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Genung, John F. 1893. Outlines of Rhetoric. Boston: Ginn. Gleason, H. A., Jr. 1961. An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, rev. ed. New

York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Hayakawa, S. I. 1941. Language in Action. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Hodges, John C., and Whitten, Mary E. 1967. Harbrace College Handbook, 6th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace and World.

Kennedy, Arthur G. 1935. Current English. Boston: Ginn.

Kenyon, John S. 1948. "Cultural Levels and Functional Varieties of English." College English 10: 31-36.

Labov, William. 1972. "Some Principles of Linguistic Methodology." Language in

Society 1: 97-120. Leggett, Glenn; Mead, David C.; and Charvat, William. 1974. Prentice-Hall

Handbook for Writers, 6th ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Meyers, Walter E. 1974. Handbook of Contemporary English. New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich. Millhauser, Milton. 1952. "The Case against Slang." English Journal 41: 306-9. Olesen, Virginia, and Whittaker, Elvi. 1968. "Conditions under Which College

Students Borrow, Use, and Alter Slang." American Speech 43: 222-28. Partridge, Eric. 1935. Slang To-Day and Yesterday. London: Macmillan.

Rapoport, Anatol. 1975. Semantics. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Sledd, James. 1965. "On Not Teaching English Usage." English Journal 54: 698-

703. Wentworth, Harold B., and Flexner, Stuart Berg. 1960. Dictionary of American

Slang. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. 2d ed., 1975. Whitman, Walt. 1885. "Slang in America." In The Collected Writings of Walt Whit-

man: Prose Works 1892, edited by Floyd Stovall, 2: 572-77. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964.

A REPORT FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF NEWSPEAK

"'Because of all the changes in American society, we are losing our intuitive ability to parent,' claims an anthropologist who helps run a

parent study program. 'The people we service have no sense of parent- ing because they weren't parented themselves' " (New York Times, 16 Sep. 1975, p. 84, ad for Newsweek magazine). And anthropologists are losing their intuitive ability to language. Perhaps they weren't teachered prop- erly. Robert Christian, chief negotiator for the Board of Education in New York City, observed (WCBS radio, 8 Sep. 1975): "We are faced with the need for tremendous layoffs, excessing of teachers." It all fits.

M.C.



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