At 10:26 AM -0400 7/17/05, Andrew Stiller wrote:
Beggin' your pardon, but that word is not slang. Here's how my dictionary defines slang: 1) A kind of language esp. occurring in casual or playful speech, usu. made up of short-lived coinages and figures of speech *deliberately used in place of standard terms* [emphasis mine] for effects such as raciness, humor, or irreverence. 2) Language peculiar to a group; argot or jargon.
Thank you for damping the rampant speculation, Andrew. Looking for logical precursors is a lost cause. The key words above are "short-lived." The typical slang term has a half-life ranging from about a month to as much as a decade, depending on how overused it becomes by those in popular culture. Slang from the 1920s and '30s sounds dated and archaic today as, indeed, does much of the slang from the 60s.
Slang terms spontaneously erupt among "in-group" members who want to be distinguished from "non-in-group" individuals as being "hip" (late '40s as in "I'm hip," meaning "I'm an insider" or "I understand"; morphed into "hep" in the late '50s, back into "hip" in the '60s, at least in the USAF Band). Slang can be associated with geography and stereotypes ("fer sure"--California airheads), with social class ("motha," which is actually half the original word!), or with small in-groups. In the USAF band in the late '50s, one's instrument was referred to as one's "axe" for no discernable reason, and then "axe" came also to mean a stool (and I DON'T mean the kind you sit on!), as in "I have to drop an axe."
It's typical for slang to become so overused that the original in-group will no longer have anything to do with it--"it ain't hip." One phrase that's reaching that point is "My bad," which I assume comes from some TV show that I don't watch. I've never heard the terms "phat" or "fly" with whatever meanings the rest of you attribute to them, so I'm definitely less hip than Crystal's teenagers, and I'm certainly not ready to come to terms with "bling bling" (which sounds like a fast-food commercial!!--or am I thinking of "ka-ching"!).
The F word (not to set off anybody's spam filters) is in fact standard English. All it's numerous synonyms are either euphemisms, technical jargon, or--slang.
Anglo-Saxon, n'est-çe pas? John -- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
