Slang

One of the important uses of slang is to divide in-groups from out-groups. The ones inside are those who know the slang, which is entirely obscure to those in the outside. Slang also works to disguise meaning, and so it’s a regular feature of outlaws of all sorts. The proliferation of slang words for drugs and the drug trade is a case in point.

 

Here’s a passage of slang, from one of the coney-catching pamphlets published in London in the late mid-sixteenth century:

 

We will filch some duds off the ruffmans, or mill the ken for a lag of duds. So may we happen on the harmans, and cly the jerk, or to the queer-ken and scour queer cramp-rings, and so to trining on the chats.

 

A"coney" is a bunny, and to "catch" a coney is to trap it, so "coney-catching" is slang for thieving from idiots. A translation, provided by Stephen Greenblatt in his Dark Renaissance:

 

We will steal some clothes from the hedges or rob a house for a basket of clothes. But we could be set in the stocks and be whipped or taken to prison, there to be shackled with fetters, and then hanged on the gallows.

 

It’s thieves’ cant, the slang of folks too poor to get along without filching whatever came to hand—there’s a version of that need in Shakespeare’s _The Winter’s Tale_, which introduces Autolycus in 4.3 as follows:

 

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,

With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!

Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.

 

“Pugging” is a slang word. It translates to “thieving.”

 

And translation is the name of the game for slang. It is deliberately obscure for anyone outside the in-group. To make any slang statement clear to an outsider requires the same process that makes a foreign language intelligible.

 

Besides translation, a necessary consequence of slang is that it must always, but always change, and do so pretty rapidly. As soon as the slang terms becomes transparent, especially to the forces of law and order, new terms must come into being. Heroin is dope, smack, junk, H, hero, horse, boy, skag, mud, thunder. . . .

 

But even when slang isn’t associated with something illegal, the terms change as soon as their meaning gets spread enough so that they no longer separate in- from out-group. So “groovy” becomes "fire," "dope," "boss," "rad," "sleek.” There’s an obvious cross-fertilization from drug terms in the move from being in the groove to being dope, but the more general direction is obscurity or meaning. No sleek dude wants to make the mistake of using the wrong term and making meaning clear to everyone.

 

Being now an old man, I’ve noticed that the older I get the less slang is in my common discourse. I’m not sure why that is other than the obvious fact that age and grooviness are worlds apart. But I suspect there’s a smidgeon of social reality that creeps in. The in-group/out-group dynamic disappears when, as a result of the inevitable need to make money, I have to make what had been a narrowly defined in-group as large and comprehensive as possible. I can’t convince someone to buy my product, listen to my lecture, send money to my cause if I try to do it with language that is simply too obscure to convey meaning.

 

And so the standard language comes to the rescue. It may still be dope to celebrate being inside the orbit of the cool and boss. But, as they say, follow the money to a mutually understood lingo.