Студопедия — The social dynamics of slang
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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.







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