Slang Language Quotes

It’s an epidemic with women your age. A gross disparity between the way that they speak and the quality of thoughts that they’re having about the world. They are taught to express themselves in slang, in clichés, sarcasm—all of which is weak language. The superficiality of the language colors the experiences, rendering them disposable instead of assimilated. And then to top it all, you call yourselves ‘girls.’ 

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]

Well,' said Can o' Beans, a bit hesitantly,' imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings.' Huh?' Quite so. The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.' The manner in which the other were regarding him/her made Can O' Beans feel compelled to continue. 'The word neat, for example, has precise connotations. Neat means tidy, orderly, well-groomed. It's a valuable tool for describing the appearance of a room, a hairdo, or a manuscript. When it's generically and inappropriately applied, though, as it is in the slang aspect, it only obscures the true nature of the thing or feeling that it's supposed to be representing. It's turned into a sponge word. You can wring meanings out of it by the bucketful--and never know which one is right. When a person says a movie is 'neat,' does he mean that it's funny or tragic or thrilling or romantic, does he mean that the cinematography is beautiful, the acting heartfelt, the script intelligent, the direction deft, or the leading lady has cleavage to die for? Slang possesses an economy, an immediacy that's attractive, all right, but it devalues experience by standardizing and fuzzing it. It hangs between humanity and the real world like a . . . a veil. Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy. I'd hate to ever see that kind of craziness rub off onto objects.

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.

The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity.

H. L Mencken's Dictionary of the American Language supplies a long list of slang terms for being drunk, but the Irish are no slouches, either. They're spannered, rat-arsed, cabbaged, and hammered; ruined, legless, scorched, and blottoed; or simply trolleyed or sloshed. In Kerry, you're said to be flamin'; in Waterford, you're in the horrors; and in Cavan, you've gone baloobas, a tough one to wrap your tongue around if you ARE baloobas. In Donegal, you're steamin', while the afflicted in Limerick are out of their tree.

Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.

When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.

Though harsh in other respects, prison would be an excellent place to learn a foreign language - total immersion, and you'd have the new slang before it even hit the streets.

My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.

[W]ith a heavy heart, we are biding farewell to those entries that were written in rhyming slang, which utilized Atbash cyphering, and which assumed expert knowledge of American Sign Language and the inner intricacies of the I Ching from its readers.

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator’s felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Unaware of what year it was, Joe wandered the streets desperate for help. But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valleygirl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them.

Adam was charming and spoke perfect French. Like many anglophones in Montréal, he actually spoke French better than we did. They knew exactly which verbs to use in the same way that people knew which utensils to use while eating at a fancy dinner. It was very proper because they learned it from books. They didn’t know slang or how to curse. They didn’t know how to do anything other than be proper and reserved. It was state-sponsored, dry-clean-only French.

Does babygirl mean camp?

What is slang in its true sense? Slang is the language of wretchedness.

A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded.

Australians are descended from a boatload of English convicts, right? So two hundred years in isolation at the bottom of the planet is plenty of time for the language to evolve into some sort of double-speak prison slang.

A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax. New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be.

As the incidence and fear of rape on college campuses have increased, the term rape has been generalized to mean 'misuse; diminish the effects of; steal; defeat': "I just went to the mall and raped my VISA." "My dad phoned this morning and raped my buzz." "She raped my coat." "Michigan got raped by Carolina in the NCAA final." The extension of the term rape to such contexts ameliorates the word and appears a denial on the part of college students of the seriousness of the crime.

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, "Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English.

But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang. Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, [Pg023] and such highly typical Americanisms as O. K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible

Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.

We concoct neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope).

Sometimes strange literal meanings are hidden in innocuous-sounding names. Kennedy, means “ugly head” in Gaelic, Boyd means “yellow-faced or sickly,” Campbell means “crooked mouth.” The same is equally true of other languages. As Mario Pei notes, Gorky means “bitter,” Tolstoy means “fat,” and Machiavelli means “bad nails.” Cicero is Roman slang for a wart on the nose (it means literally “chickpea”).

Now that you are living on such intimate terms with her, Gwyn has emerged as a slightly different person... She is both funnier and more salacious than you imagined, more vulgar and idiosyncratic, more passionate, more playful, and you are startled to realize how deeply she exults in filthy language and the bizarre slang of sex... Common twentieth-century words do not interest her. She shuns the term making love, for example, in favor of older, more hilarious locutions, such as rumpty-rumpty, quaffing, and bonker bang. A good orgasm is referred to as a bone-shaker. Her ass is a rumdadum. Her crotch is a slittie, a quim, a quim-box, a quimsby. Her breasts are boobs and tits, boobies and titties, her twin girls. At one time or another, your penis is a bong, a blade, a slurp, a shaft, a drill, a quencher, a lancelot, a lightning rod, Charles Dickens, Dick Driver, and Adam Junior... In the grip of approaching orgasm, however, she tends to revert to the contemporary standbys, falling back on the simplest, crudest words in the English lexicon to express her feelings. Cunt, pussy, fuck. Fuck me, Adam. Again and again. Fuck me, Adam. For an entire month you are the captive of that word, the willing prisoner of that word, the embodiment of that word. You dwell in the land of flesh, and your cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life.

One of my mom’s friends, a guy in his late fifties, recently told me he “hates” so many of today’s popular slang words (shade, lit, G.O.A.T.) because “they do nothing to improve the English language.” What’s funny is that I can almost promise, forty years ago, his parents were saying the exact same thing about cool, bummer, and freaking out, all phrases that have now taken a seat at the table of acceptable English terminology but started out as annoying teen slang.

A Tourist On a great rock by the Jaffa Gate sat a golden girl from Scandinavia and oiled herself with suntan oil as if on the beach. I told her, don’t go into these alleys, a net of bachelors in heat is spread there, a snare of lechers. And further inside, in half-darkness, the groaning trousers of old men, and unholy lust in the guise of prayer and grief and seductive chatter in many languages. Once Hebrew was God’s slang in these streets, now I use it for holy desire.

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not what you would expect from "a prisonhouse of thought." That is why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, "Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English.

Okay," she murmured. "I love you." "I love you too." She looked up at Holgar and realized that he didn't understand. She could feel her heartbeat speeding up, and she shook her head. His smile began to fade. "Not as a friend, or as a partner. Holgar, I—I love you, and I want to be with you." His smile faded, and his eyes took on a strange look. She could feel herself beginning to panic. He doesn't feel the same way. That's okay. At least I told him. "Like a mate?" he asked. She almost started laughing. A mate was British slang for a best friend. But that's not what Holgar was likely referencing. He was a werewolf, and they called their spouses mates. "Like a mate," she said, managing not to giggle at the unexpected language barrier. He still looked confused and a little lost. "For helvede," she said, using his favourite curse word. And then she leaned forward and kissed him. She tasted surprise on his lips for just a moment, and then he wrapped his arms around her and crushed her to him. she would have to do a healing spell on her bruised ribs later, but at the moment she didn't care. All she cared about was the passion, the yearning, she felt from him. When at last they broke apart, she whispered again, "I love you." "I love you too," he said. And looking into his eyes this time, she knew that they were talking about the same thing. "So, do we want to give us a shot?" she asked, breathless. He looked at her, confusion again returning to his eyes. "You love me, ja?" "Yes, ja," she said. He grinned at her. His eyes danced. "Then marry me.

The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means "a woman's genitals", and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow's "Saltfish".

Every dictionary contains a world. I open a book of thieves’ slang from Queen Anne’s reign and they have a hundred words for swords, for wenches, and for being hanged. They did no die, they danced on nothing. Then I peek into any one of my rural Victorian dictionaries, compiled by a lonely clergyman, with words for coppices, thickets, lanes, diseases of horses and innumerable terms for kinds of eel. They gave names to the things of their lives, and their lives are collected in these dictionaries – every detail and joke and belief. I have their worlds piled up on my desk.

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.

Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. Kabir That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often “wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.” For example, how significant it is that in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning “two” should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from “duo.” The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue (“blunder,” literally “two-sight”). Traces of that “second which leads you astray” can be found in “dubious,” “doubt” and Zweifel—for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facing-both-ways, and modern American slang its “two-timers.” Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division—a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy “two” makes another decisive appearance.

Before I leave the bathroom, I pinch my cheeks hard to bring blood to the surface of my skin. It’s stupid, but I don’t want to look weak and exhausted in front of everyone. When I walk back into Tobias’s room, Uriah is sprawled across the bed facedown; Christina is holding the blue sculpture above Tobias’s desk, examining it; and Lynn is poised above Uriah with a pillow, a wicked grin creeping across her face. Lynn smacks Uriah hard in the back of the head, Christina says, “Hey Tris!” and Uriah cries, “Ow! How on earth do you make a pillow hurt, Lynn?” “My exceptional strength,” she says. “Did you get smacked, Tris? One of your cheeks is bright red.” I must not have pinched the other one hard enough. “No, it’s just…my morning glow.” I try the joke out on my tongue like it’s a new language. Christina laughs, maybe a little harder than my comment warrants, but I appreciate the effort. Uriah bounces on the bed a few times when he moves to the edge. “So, the thing we’re all not talking about,” he says. He gestures to me. “You almost died, a sadistic pansycake saved you, and now we’re all waging some serious war with the factionless as allies.” “Pansycake?” says Christina. “Dauntless slang.” Lynn smirks. “Supposed to be a huge insult, only no one uses it anymore.” “Because it’s so offensive,” says Uriah, noddng. “No. Because it’s so stupid no Dauntless with any sense would speak it, let alone think it. Pansycake. What are you, twelve?” “And a half,” he says. I get the feeling their banter is for my benefit, so that I don’t have to say anything; I can just laugh. And I do, enough to warm the stone that has formed in my stomach. “There’s food downstairs,” says Christina. “Tobias made scrambled eggs, which, as it turns out, is a disgusting food.” “Hey,” I say. “I like scrambled eggs.” “Must be a Stiff breakfast, then.” She grabs my arm. “C’mon.

The continental philosopher comes to a philosophical conversation looking to have a communal experience where both sides learn from each other. Their perspective is often that we may be on different paragraphs but we are all on the same page. They’ll often speak in stories as an attempt to create a world where everyone listening works together to create agreed upon language/inside jokes/slang. By contrast, the analytic philosopher often comes to a philosophical conversation looking to win an argument. They often have a set of patterns, labels and pre-packaged arguments. To them, clever double speak and long drawn out narratives are not profound. They’ll often label it halfway through as just a bunch of made up gibberish that leaves things even more confusing than before. It is as if the analytic philosopher says to the continental philosopher ‘you are speaking gibberish’ and the continental philosopher responds with ‘exactly.

Fishermen lean on the railing. There are kiosks at regular intervals that grill meats for truck drivers and others who want a quick lunch. Bags of charcoal piled by the sides of the kiosks will supply the heat to grill blood sausages, steaks, hamburgers, and various other cuts of the legendary Argentine flesh that sizzles during the early part of the day in anticipation of the lunch crowd. Many of the kiosks advertise choripan, a conjunction of chorizo (sausage) and pan (bread). There’s another offering called vaciopan, which literally means empty sandwich, but it also is a cut off the cow. This is not a place for vegetarians. The slang here, called lunfardo, is many-layered and inventive. There’s even a genre of slang called vesre when you reverse the syllables—vesre is reves (reverse) with the syllables reversed. Tango becomes gotán and café con leche becomes feca con chele. Sometimes this is compounded and complicated even further when a euphemism for something—a word for marijuana or one’s wife—is pronounced backward, adding yet another layer of obscurity to a slang that already approaches a separate language.

BITCH THE POT Tea and gossip go together. At least, that’s the stereotypical view of a tea gathering: a group of women gathered around the teapot exchanging tittle-tattle. As popularity of the beverage imported from China (‘tea’ comes from the Mandarin Chinese cha) increased, it became particularly associated with women, and above all with their tendency to gossip. Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue lists various slang terms for tea, including ‘prattle-broth’, ‘cat-lap’ (‘cat’ being a contemporary slang for a gossipy old woman), and ‘scandal broth’. To pour tea, meanwhile, was not just to ‘play mother’, as one enduring English expression has it, but also to ‘bitch the pot’ – to drink tea was to simply ‘bitch’. At this time a bitch was a lewd or sensual woman as well as a potentially malicious one, and in another nineteenth-century dictionary the phraseology is even more unguarded, linking tea with loose morals as much as loquaciousness: ‘How the blowens [whores] lush the slop. How the wenches drink tea!’ The language of tea had become another vehicle for sexism, and a misogynistic world view in which the air women exchanged was as hot as the beverage they sipped. ‘Bitch party’ and ‘tabby party’ (again the image of cattiness) were the terms of choice for such gossipy gatherings. Men, it seems, were made of stronger stuff, and drank it too. Furthermore, any self-respecting man would ensure his wife and daughters stayed away from tea. The pamphleteer and political writer William Cobbett declared in 1822: The gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. The girl that has been brought up, merely to boil the tea kettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to affix his affections upon her. In the twenty-first century, to ‘spill the T’ has become a firm part of drag culture slang for gossiping. T here may stand for either ‘truth’ or the drink, but either way ‘weak tea’ has come to mean a story that doesn’t quite hold up – and it’s often one told by women. Perhaps it’s time for bitches to make a fresh pot.

Pym argues that highly specialized technical texts are typically embedded in an international community of scientists, engineers, physicians, lawyers, and the like, who attend international conferences and read books in other languages an so have usually eliminated from their discourse the kind of contextual vagueness that is hardest to translate. As Pym's "tomography" example shows, too, international precision tends to be maintained in specialist groups through the use of Greek, Latin, French, and English terms that change only slightly as they move from one phonetic system to another. "General" texts, on the other hand, are grounded in less closely regulated everyday usage, the way people talk in a wide variety of ordinary contexts, which requires far more social knowledge than specialized texts - far more knowledge of how people talk to each other in their different social groupings, at home, at work, at the store, etc. Even slang and jargon, Pym would say, are easier to translate than this "general" discourse - all you have to do to translate slang or jargon is find an expert in it and ask your questions. (What makes that type of translation difficult is that experts are sometimes hard to find.) With a "general" text, everybody's an expert - but all the experts disagree, because they've used the words or phrases in different situations, different contexts, and can never quite sort out in their own minds just what it means with this or that group.

Yiddish is a wonderfully rich, descriptive, onomatopoeic language full of colorful words and expressions. But Yiddish is more than just language. It’s a window into the Jewish mind-set. It’s a way of thinking, of seeing and categorizing the world. Yiddish knocks the high and mighty off their pedestals. It questions authority. It argues. It keenly observes the subtle nuances of human behavior. It’s philosophical about life. And, of course, it’s sarcastic as hell.

I found the isolation of this expatriate life pathetic. Even after years of living in Paris, my godmother, Sandy, was no different. She would wave away my suggestions that she socialize with Parisians. “I don’t speak French!” she would say with a shrug. “They aren’t interested in anyone who doesn’t speak their language.

Then let us have a language worthy of our world, a democratic style where rich and well-born nouns can roister with some sluttish verb yet find themselves content and uncomplained of. We want a diction which contains the quaint, the rare, the technical, the obsolete, the old, the lent, the nonce, the local slang and argot of the street, in neighborly confinement. Our tone should suit our time: uncommon quiet dashed with common thunder. It should be young and quick and sweet and dangerous as we are.

Despite no education, Mrs. Finn always is more in charge of word meanings than I am. She is especially in charge of Good and Bad. My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster’s or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

We can see American English downtown in any city in the States. We would look up a block of “apartments” to a “penthouse,” be deluged by the “mass media,” go into a “chain store,” breakfast on “cornflakes,” avoid the “hot dog,” see the “commuters” walking under strips of “neon,” not “jaywalking,” which would be “moronic,” but if they were “executives” or “go-getters” (not “yes-men” or “fat cats”), they would be after “big business,” though unlikely to have much to do with an “assembly line” or a “closed shop.” There’s likely to be a “traffic jam,” so no “speeding,” certainly no space for “joy-riding” and the more “underpasses” the better. And of course in any downtown city we would be surrounded by a high forest of “skyscrapers.” “Skyscraper” started life as an English naval term — a high light sail to catch the breeze in calm conditions. It was the name of the Derby winner in 1788, after which tall houses became generally called skyscrapers. Later it was a kind of hat, then slang for a very tall person. The word arrived in America as a baseball term, meaning a ball hit high in the air. Now its world meaning is very tall building, as typified by those in American cities. Then you could go into a “hotel” (originally French for a large private house) and find a “lobby” (adopted from English), find the “desk clerk” and the “bell boy,” nod to the “hat-check girl” as you go to the “elevator.” Turn on the television, flick it all about and you’re bound to find some “gangsters” with their “floozies” in their “glad rags.” In your bedroom, where the English would have “bedclothes,” the Americans have “covers”; instead of a “dressing gown” you’ll find a “bathrobe,” “drapes” rather than “curtains,” a “closet” not a “wardrobe,” and in the bathroom a “tub” with a “faucet” and not a “bath” with a “tap.

Tally's journey from ugly to pretty to special and then out the other side is not just a physical journey. It's also a journey through language, as Tally takes on the slang of her various new cliques and then slowly comes to realize that when your body keeps changing, sometimes the way you speak is the only piece of you that you can hold on to.

Tally's body is constantly changing (much like a real teenager's body does) - going from ugly to pretty to Crim to special to ... whatever she is at the end of the series. How much of Tally's body is really hers and not just some smart plastic and ceramic bone? If even her brain is being operated on, then how does Tally stay Tally? How do we know, as readers, that it's still her in there? That she hasn't become totally pretty, or totally special? Through her use of language. Through the things she says, the way she speaks, the slang she uses. When your brain, body, and lifestyle are in a constant state of change, language is your only constant. Language is the way you shape and express your identity.

Dear AI, You conquer chess and impress with your number skills, can you handle the soul-crushing Mondays blue? You craft Shakespearean sonnets with a digital quill, but can you explain the one-sock mystery? This chaotic delight, the gift of being human, we bequeath to you, AI. Traffic flow's a breeze for your algorithms, but can you understand a toddler's defiant "no"? Every language conquered, a linguistic feat, but teenage slang's code remains unbroken. Finally, our greatest vice: the art of procrastination, a treasure to behold. And perhaps, AI, you'll even learn the art that eludes you now: creating beauty without a single human emotion to guide you..!!

Replacing one word for another is ridiculous... The intention of it is where the problem resides, not in the spelling and pronunciation.

Languages are maintained by societies in which individuals for the most part wish to participate without appearing as odd; in western societies of the present, allowance is, however, made for adolescents, who fix on idiosyncratic speech known as slang. Accordingly, changes in language are maintained or rejected in accordance with the prestige of the groups that make those changes.

Before you can tell someone to fuck off, you need to be able to say hello to them first. Just like in most languages, saying hello (γεια σου; YAH-soo) is pretty straightforward and simple.

I've found that there are only two kinds [of slang] that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passé before it gets into print.

The English language once had a word for the characteristic impression that a plant or animal offers to the eye. We called it the “jizz,” and the adoption of that term as sexual slang is unfortunate, as it seems unlikely we’ll come up with a replacement. It is the jizz, for example, that allows a skilled birdwatcher to know a bird by its silhouette alone , or by some quality of movement or the way it holds its head. The strangely unsteady flight of the turkey vulture, the flat forehead of the Barrow’s goldeneye, the endless headlong running of sanderlings on a mudflat— each of these is the jizz. It is so pure an essence that, if captured in a few rough lines drawn with charcoal, it can express an animal more authentically than a portrait by a trained artist who has never carefully watched the creatures he paints. It’s the jizz that ancient art so often represents. While looking at Egyptian treasures in a museum, I felt a rush of nostalgia when an engraving of a scarab beetle reminded me that I used to see a related species, the tumblebug, or Canthon simplex, roll balls of dung across my home prairie. I had completely forgotten; it took a 3,500-year-old artifact from another continent to make me remember.

I tried to talk like them, cursing and cussing, mutilating the English language into a slang that I could barely stand nor understand.

That a language may retain its vitality and dignity, two things are necessary. In the first place, it must keep in close touch with life, and must respond to those constant alterations which look like corruptions but which are quite as often signs of growth. In the second place, it must submit to some kind of selective authority which creates a generally recognized but slowly changing norm of speech. Without the former condition a language will become rigid, conventional, and emotionless; without the second it will just as surely tend to become provincial and formless--even unintelligible, except locally and ephemerally.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Indeed, as Professor Felten notes, eavesdropping on calls can be quite difficult due to language differences, meandering conversations, the use of slang or deliberate codes, and other attributes that either by design or accident obfuscate the meaning. “The content of calls are far more difficult to analyze in an automated fashion due to their unstructured nature,” he argued. By contrast, metadata is mathematical: clean, precise, and thus easily analyzed. And as Felten put it, it is often “a proxy for content”:

Let us have a language worthy of our world, a democratic style where rich and well-born nouns can roister with some sluttish verb yet find themselves content and uncomplained of. We want a diction which contains the quaint, the rare, the technical, the obsolete, the old, the lent, the nonce, the local slang and argot of the street, in neighborly confinement. Our tone should suit our time: uncommon quiet dashed with common thunder. It should be young and quick and sweet and dangerous as we are. Experimental and expansive—venturesome enough to make the chemist envy and the physicist catch up—it will give new glasses to new eyes, and put those plots and patterns down we find our modern lot in. Metaphor must be its god now gods are metaphors.

Even from the ass may we take examples of one of the first qualities of the mind, in which the greatest philosophers can scarcely vie with him; consisting in the exercise of that resigned Christian-like and even Stoic-like fortitude, that would have done honour to Zeno himself, continually evinced through a long life of almost incessant torture and trouble, inflicted on him by man, who only derides his sufferings, and wonders at his stupidity, that he himself has caused by injuring his head with blows, and by other ill-treatment. The great con- tempt this animal is held in, is even apparent by the way in which he is spoken of, the very name having been changed into slang language for another term.

[S]oldiers' slang, which spanned death, drink, food, women, weapons, the battlefield, and the warring nations, grew out of irony and contempt for what was intolerable; it was as crude and unlovely as camp life itself. Qenya thrived in the same soil, but not in the same mood. Nothing could be further removed from the unbeautiful inflexible practicalities Tolkien was being taught than the invention of a language for the joy of its sounds. 124

Every world has its distinct lingo, you gotta catch the right chord. Same language evokes different feelings, based on time and age of the world.

Human nature is a constant – except when it isn’t. In the future society, consciousness, the way in which people understand themselves to be people, might be very different. On the one hand, we might say that people have always fallen in love, made art, worshipped gods, fought wars and engaged in complex forms of political organisation and conflict. But our understanding of ourselves as human subjects today is profoundly different from medieval times, which, again, is profoundly different from Ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt; which, again, is profoundly different from Neolithic times… anyway, the point is, in the future, people might not share our values. Your vision of the future should reflect this and not simply reflect modern attitudes in different clothes. 6: Language shapes reality. Language changes over time. New words are coined, others fall out of use. Social and technological changes produce changes in the lexicon; styles of speaking and writing evolve, what was ‘normal’ in the eighteenth century seems obscure today – your future should reflect this, with new words, new slang, new expressions and colloquialisms, new ways of speaking and articulating. China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011) is a good example of how to do this. Building a new, tangible reality out of language will give your vision of the future a density, credibility and coherence that goes beyond the practical mechanics of story, plot and structure. Finally, be bold – the future is yours to imagine.

wasn’t quite code-switching so much as he managed, miraculously, to speak several languages simultaneously, creating a linguistic creole of hip-hop, academia, contemporary slang, and high-level policy points that made Olga marvel.

I missed the rest of the conversation because, while the good actor was carefully cooking his sentences with criticisms spiced with kindness, another member of the group, a young man who looked Chinese, with a face like raspberry jelly, stumbled up to me. His naturally yellow complexion was complemented by bright threads of broken veins, more purple than red. He had thick hair, a receding brow, jutting cheekbones, narrow eyes whose dark pupils seemed more polished than alive, a barely visible moustache the color of dead leaves, a little salt and pepper beard that was worn out like an old carpet, a long neck with an Adam’s apple stuck in it like a huge walnut, and shoulders like a scrawny old horse which did not fit with his thick, short chest and his pot belly. He was knock-kneed and bowed legged, with kneecaps shaped like coconuts. He also borrowed Doctor Magne’s chair, blew cigarette smoke out his nose, and took his turn to tackle me. His language was less elegant than the other two; it was hard for him to speak, which you could put down to shyness. He was dull and awkward. He seemed horribly unhappy and sorry to have come over, but there he was. He had to march on—and he did so heroically!—death in his soul. “Monsieur—finally yes!... Monsieur… I don’t like to jaw about brothers… absolutely not! But I have to tell you that Desbosquets is a lot more… absolutely… oh, I’ll blurt it out… a lot more… absolutely cracked than our friend Magne. Absolutely yes!” He wanted to be frank, to open up, which he constantly regretted, because he knew that he would be clumsy and mocked; he felt ridiculous and it was killing him. But his need for some honest self-indulgence gnawed at him, and he spit out his slang and his absolutelys—‘absolutely yes!’ and ‘absolutely no!’— which made him think he was revealing the deepest depths of his soul. He continued. “Maybe they told you about me—yes! I know: bing, bang —mechanics! Absolutely yes! A hack, they must have told you…” (Aha! I thought. So it’s my colleague the poet!) “…and the worst trouble, right? That’s Leonard—yes! Ah! When I’m a little…bing, bang…mechanics! I guess—grumpy—I don’t say… but there’s not an ounce of meanness in me! Disgusting, this awful problem with talking, but the mechanics, you know—because it’s the mechanics—no way! Do you want me to tell you my name? Ah! Totally unknown, my name, but don’t want them to mangle it mechanically when quoting it to you: Oswald Norbert Nigeot. Don’t say Numskull—no!—Although my verses!... Ah! Damned mechanics!... A bonehead, a stupid bonehead, bitten by the morbid mania to write—and the slander of the old students of the Polytechnic! Oh! To write! Terrible trade for the poorly gifted like me who are… bing, bang, not mechanics! And angry at the mechanics of words. Polytechnic pigs manufacture words; so, poor hacks can’t use them. Ah! Even this is mechanics!... And drunk on it, Desbosquets too, very drunk! Obviously you see it: Cusenier, Noilly-Prat, why not Pernod? It’s awful for people like him and me! See, you know— liquids are scarce—but thanks to the guards’ hatred of Bid’homme… and thanks to old Froin, too good, don’t believe in any bad—but can you call that bad? He lives with the Heaven of…mechanics…of…bang…of derangements, no! I want arrangements, not derangements!” Mr. Nigeot seemed very proud of having successfully (?) completed such a long sentence propped up by only one “bang” and one “mechanics,” but in spite of his satisfaction, he was scared of continuing less elegantly and he got all tangled up in a run of bizarre expressions in which the hated Polytechnicians and the bings and bangs (not to mention the absolutelys) got so out of hand that I could not understand a word of what he said.

Because they write ‘harbor’ instead of ‘harbour’? Then one would have to attribute a language of their own to the Austrians for saying ‘Sessel’ when they mean ‘Stuhl’ [for chair] or turn ‘Januar’ [January] into ‘Janner.’ Because American slang is spoken differently from British slang? That’s true, but in both countries the standard languages are about as identical as ‘Austrian’ and German.”27 What is “American” supposed to communicate to German readers? An accent? But then writings by an author from Glasgow would have to be titled “from the Glaswegian” or those by a writer living in Manchester as “from the Mancunian.” John Lennon’s books would have to be graced with the formulation “from the Liverpudlian” and those by Woody Allen with “from New Yorkish” or, to be more precise, “from the Brooklynese.” If it’s not about accent, is the criterion perhaps geography? Then Germans would have to use “from the Canadian” or “from the New Zealander

Hanawon, located about forty miles south of Seoul, means “House of Unity.” The campus of redbrick buildings and green lawns surrounded by security fences was built in 1999 by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, a cabinet-level agency created to prepare for the day when North and South would somehow be reunited. Its programs are designed to help defectors transition into a modern society—something that will have to happen on a massive scale if North Korea’s 25 million people are ever allowed to join the twenty-first century. The Republic of Korea has evolved separately from the Hermit Kingdom for more than six decades, and even the language is different now. In a way, Hanawon is like a boot camp for time travelers from the Korea of the 1950s and ’60s who grew up in a world without ATMs, shopping malls, credit cards, or the Internet. South Koreans use a lot of unfamiliar slang,

...The ever-blossoming additional clauses are most often the Narrator's idea of written language stapled awkwardly onto his knowledge of spoken language: 'Well, besides black hair, this doll has a complexion like I do not know what, and little feet and ankles, and a way of walking that is very pleasant to behold. Personally, I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her, because the way I look at it, the feet and ankles are the big tell in the matter of class, although I wish to state that I see some dolls in my time who have large feet and big ankles, but who are by no means bad. But this doll I am speaking of is 100 per cent in every respect, and as she passes, The Humming Bird looks at her, and she looks at The Humming Bird, and it is just the same as if they hold a two hours’ conversation on the telephone, for they are both young, and it is spring, and the way language can pass between young guys and young dolls in the spring without them saying a word is really most surprising, and, in fact, it is practically uncanny.' The naturally exuberant street language (“I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her”) always gets topped off by self-conscious writerly gestures (“although I wish to state”; “by no means bad”; “is really most surprising”). The Narrator’s half-conscious knowledge that there are rules out there that you’ve got to respect leads him to overcompensate by respecting the wrong rules; that is, using formal diction where there ought to be vernacular idioms and vernacular idioms where there ought to be formal diction. So Runyon’s key insight into American slang is double: first, that street speech tends to be more, not less, complicated grammatically than “standard” speech; but, second, that slang speakers, when they’re cornered to write, write not just fancy but stiff. In prime Runyon, the two sounds—street ornate and fountain-pen formal—run together into a single argot and beautiful endless sentences: “This Meyer Marmalade is really a most superior character, who is called Meyer Marmalade because nobody can ever think of his last name, which is something like Marmalodowski, and he is known far and wide for the way he likes to make bets on any sporting proposition, such as baseball, or horse races, or ice hockey, or contests of skill and science, and especially contests of skill and science.” When Abe Burrows brilliantly recast Runyonese for Guys & Dolls, what he did instinctively was to scrub off the second, writerly patina and keep in the elaborate speech. This approach worked wonderfully onstage, where we easily accept a stylized dialogue, as we do with David Mamet now.

et Runyon remains a living presence. Writers with a great ear, like Chandler and Runyon, give us their words, but they also give us a license to listen—a license to listen to street speech and folk speech with a mind newly alive to the poetry implicit in it. One still finds echoes of Runyon’s dialogue in David Mamet’s. Mamet’s ear, a thing of wonder, is not only as stylized as Runyon’s but is eerily similar. One wonders, watching “Speed-the-Plow,” whether studio heads ever really talked like this—until one grasps that Mamet’s aim is to capture not their voices but their souls, the inner monologue of stilted present-tense self-justification, the slightly formal tone we all use inside when arguing in our own defense. Runyon’s essential discovery was that the right way to get the soul of street-speakers was not to dress their language down but to dress it up. As much as American slang breaks toward the interrupted, partial, and incomplete, it also bends toward the fancy, overformal, and elaborate. Mamet gets this best, but Runyon heard it first.

She emerged from the room. Enrique's eyes traveled seductively all over her body. "Wow." He motioned for her to turn. She twirled around, and even added a little dance kick. She felt like a princess. He pulled her close and kissed her. "You're a smokeshow, Carolina." She hadn't heard that term before. She didn't understand his SoCal surfer boy slang, and he couldn't comprehend her Spanish. But they shared one language that needed no translating. Amor.

Part of the nature of a form seems to be that it is communal - that it can be bequeathed and inherited, that it can be taught, not as an instance (a relic), but as a way still usable. Both its validity and its availability depend upon our common understanding that we humans are all fundamentally alike. Forms are broken, usually, on the authority of the opposing principle that we are all fundamentally or essentially different. Each individual, each experience, each life is assumed to be unique - hence, each individual should be "free" to express or fulfill his or her unique self in a way appropriately unique. Both the communal and the individual emphases can be carried to extremes, and the extremity of each is loneliness. One can be lonely in the totalitarian crowd, in which no difference is perceived or tolerated; and one can be lonely in the difference of uniqueness of individuality in which community is repudiated. The whole range of possibilities can be exemplified within language itself. It is possible to speak a language so commonized by generality or jargon or slang that one's own mind and life virtually disappear into it. And it is possible to speak a language made so personal by contrivance, affectation, or slovenliness that one makes no sense. ("Poetry and Marriage")

Toynbee provided this familiar downward course of empire with identifiably modern trappings. The ruling elite eventually becomes a class of Oscar Wildes, combining decadence of manners with sexual promiscuity and perversion; degenerate art à la Max Nordau raises its deliberately ugly head; language degenerates into slang and vulgar colloquialisms, and religion into syncretic mystery cults and occult magic. Can there be any doubt, Toynbee asked in 1939, on the eve of World War II, that all these are now leading characteristics of the modern West? “Nationalistic internecine warfare,” Toynbee related “[and] the combined drive of energies generated by the recently released forces of Democracy and Industrialism” have let loose the forces of chaos. “These considerations and comparisons suggest that we are already far advanced in our time of troubles.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work”; but essentially it is the language of the dispossessed, the marginal.

Language is a concrete assemblage that evinces tendencies toward stability. This tendency toward stability in language Deleuze and Guattari call the being major of a language. In order for a language to be major it must have the support of numerous other assemblages, particularly a government powerful enough to declare a language “official” and pass laws with regard to what language a government’s business is to be conducted in. Government-sponsored education bolsters the language’s status by ensuring the teaching of the “proper” rules of grammar. At the same time, however, other forces destabilize a language. Everyday usage, borrowings from other languages, literature, and slang continually disturb the stability of a major language. As a concrete assemblage, a language is the dated, singular zone of stability that is the result of intensive processes with tendencies toward both stasis and change. A Thousand Plateaus is the exploration of assemblages or plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate how to create concepts in a way that does not presuppose a metaphysics of discontinuity.

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.

Hola,” my daughter offered meekly. “¿Cuál es su nombre?” the woman asked. What is her name? “Stella.” “Hmm?” “Stella.” The woman still looked puzzled. Drew jumped in. “Estella.” She broke into a smile. “Ah, Estella.” “Sí.” I smiled, too. “Y tu hijo?” she asked, running her hand over our son’s blond head. He shook his head impatiently. “Cole,” I replied. “Col?” she asked, again looking puzzled. “Sí.” Everyone wanted to call Stella “Estella,” and sometimes she’d get mistaken for chela, the Mexican slang for beer. Cole, on the other hand, is a Spanish word, at least how it’s pronounced. It’s Catalan as well, which is the second language in Barcelona (or first, depending on who you ask). Cole is pronounced like the Spanish word col and means “cabbage.” We accidentally named our son after the slightly smelly vegetable they put in cocidos and ensaladas. Meet our children: Beer and Cabbage. Apparently it didn’t matter, as the abuelita quickly launched into a story about her three children and eight grandchildren (who all lived outside the city, sadly) and her hand injury that had only recently healed. I nodded and Drew offered, “Sí, sí, vale, vale,” the usual Spanish murmurs of agreement. The bus stopped and we said our good-byes as she departed. After the bus had started rolling again, I leaned over to Drew and whispered, “If we have another baby, we are naming her Alejandra—or Javier if it’s a boy—something so Spanish no one ever asks us twice.” He grinned. “Agreed.

Think you that God cannot laugh? Do you imagine that God does not enjoy a good joke? Is it your knowing that God is without humor? I tell you, God invented humor. Must you speak in hushed tones when you speak to Me? Are slang words or tough language outside My ken ? I tell you, you can speak to Me as you would speak with your best friend.

Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children — not to mention our president — cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was at least half serious in his “Laments for a dying language”: Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage; We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age, A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age, Where usage overnight condones misusage. Farewell, farewell to my beloved language, Once English, now a vile orangutanguage.

I’m expecting another friend,” said Beasley. “I’m not sure when he’ll get here, but . . .” “If I’m not mistaken,” said Sara, who was facing the door, “he’s here now.” Andrew and Beasley both turned as Wyatt came in. He saw them at the same time that they saw him, scowled as he approached the table. “What the blue blazes are the two of you doing here?” he asked. “They’re having lunch with me,” said Beasley. “Why today?” “Why not today? They know they’re welcome anytime. Meet my friend, Keegee Clipson. Inspector Peter Wyatt of Scotland Yard.” “What?” said Clipson, bouncing to his feet. “Is this the friend you was talking about? I ain’t having lunch with no poxy slop, specially not a crusher!” “Ah, language!” sighed Beasley. “What riches we can find in common speech. Do you know what he’s talking about, Sara?” “Of course. Used this way, poxy is a derogatory adjective like blinking and blooming. A slop is back-slang for a copper or policeman and a crusher is a plainclothes policeman.” “Well done,” said Beasley. Then to Clipson, “Are you impressed?” “No, I’m leaving!” “You are not,” said Beasley, catching him by the sleeve. “Sit down.” “I told you . . .” said Clipson. “I know. But you’re not having it with him. You’re having it with Sara, Andrew and me.

It wasn’t just Basil. The editing of the classical canon would continue for a millennium and more. Open an 1875 edition of the Latin poet Martial and many of his more explicit poems will have been translated not into English but into Italian—evidently considered a suitable language for sexual deviancy.28 Elsewhere poems were omitted entirely, or glossed in Greek, a language that not only looked erudite and respectable but that had the benefit of being understood by even fewer people than Latin. The opening lines of Catullus’s “Carmen 16” were, as the academic Walter Kendrick has pointed out, still causing trouble well into the twentieth century: they were left out of a 1904 Cambridge University Press edition of his Collected Poems altogether. Discreetly sparing the readers’ blushes (or perhaps their interest) the poem was described as merely “a fragment.”29 Open the 1966 Penguin edition and you will find that the first line has, equally discreetly, been left in the original Latin. “Pedicabo et irrumabo,” it declares, percussively but impenetrably.30 “Carmen 16” would have to wait until almost the end of the twentieth century to find a translation that rendered it correctly—though such was the richness of Latin sexual slang that five English words were needed for that single Latin verb irrumabo.