Sin and Slang

If you had grown up in the first part of the 19th century, your mother might have washed out your mouth with soap if she'd heard you using any of these words: fun, mob, snob, coax, swap, stingy, tiny, and touchy.

Not so long ago all of these now quite respectable words were regarded as slang. And to some guardians of the language, such as Archbishop Richard Trench of Dublin, slang was regarded as downright sinful:

How shamefully rich is the language of the vulgar everywhere in words which are not allowed to find their way into books, yet which live as a sinful oral tradition on the lips of men, to set forth that which is unholy and impure. . . . How much cleverness, how much wit, yea, how much imagination must have stood in the service of sin, before it could possess a nomenclature so rich, so varied, and often so heaven-defying as it has.
(Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words, 1851)

Fortunately, not everyone in that era associated slang with sinfulness. Influenced by the philologist William Swinton, poet Walt Whitman viewed slang as an essential--and quite "wholesome"--attribute of American English.

Such is Slang, or indirection, an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism, and express itself illimitably, which in highest walks produces poets and poems, and doubtless in pre-historic times gave the start to, and perfected, the whole immense tangle of the old mythologies. For, curious as it may appear, it is strictly the same impulse-source, the same thing. Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize.

To make it plainer, it is certain that many of the oldest and solidest words we use, were originally generated from the daring and license of slang. In the processes of word-formation, myriads die, but here and there the attempt attracts superior meanings, becomes valuable and indispensable, and lives forever. . . .

Language, be it remember’d, is not an abstract construction of the learn’d, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea. It impermeates all, the Past as well as the Present, and is the grandest triumph of the human intellect.
("Slang in America," The North American Review, November 1885)

In her book Weeds in the Garden of Words (2005), linguistics professor Kate Burridge echoes Whitman: "Today's weeds--non-grammatical expressions and pronunciations--are often rewarding garden species if left to grow. The words Samuel Johnson described as low usage and cant, such as novel, bamboozle and capture, are now totally conventional."

For the complete version of Whitman's essay, please see "Slang in America."

More About Slang:

• What Is Family Slang?
• The Language of Baseball

Image: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)