A slang is a vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in everyday conversation but avoided in formal writing and speech.
By the early nineteenth century, it was no longer exclusively associated with disreputable people, but continued to be applied to usages below the level of standard educated speech.
[2] In Scots dialect it meant "talk, chat, gossip",[3] as used by Aberdeen poet William Scott in 1832: "The slang gaed on aboot their war'ly care."
[6] A Scandinavian origin has been proposed (compare, for example, Norwegian slengenavn, which means "nickname"), but based on "date and early associations" is discounted by the Oxford English Dictionary.
[2] Jonathon Green, however, agrees with the possibility of a Scandinavian origin, suggesting the same root as that of sling, which means "to throw", and noting that slang is thrown language – a quick and honest way to make your point.
[11] While many forms of lexicon may be considered low-register or "sub-standard", slang remains distinct from colloquial and jargon terms because of its specific social contexts.
[12] While colloquialisms and jargon may seem like slang because they reference a particular group, they do not necessarily fit the same definition because they do not represent a particular effort to replace the general lexicon of a standard language.
Colloquialisms are considered more acceptable and more expected in standard usage than slang is, and jargon is often created to talk about aspects of a particular field that are not accounted for in the general lexicon.
Eric Partridge, cited as the first to report on the phenomenon of slang in a systematic and linguistic way, postulated that a term would likely be in circulation for a decade before it would be written down.
The word "gig" to refer to a performance very likely originated well before the 1930s, and remained a common term throughout the 1940s and 1950s before becoming vaguely associated with the hippie slang of the 1960s.
The word itself used to be associated with something being on fire or being "lit" up until 1988 when it was first used in writing to indicate a person who was drunk[17] in the book "Warbirds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator".
That is, for young people foxy means having the quality of: (1) attracting interest, attention, affection, (2) causing desire, (3) excellent or admirable in appearance, and (4) sexually provocative, exciting, etc., whereas sexy only refers to the quality indicated in point (4).Matiello stresses that those agents who identify themselves as "young men" have "genuinely coined" these terms and choose to use them over "canonical" terms —like beautiful or sexy—because of the indexicalized social identifications the former convey.
For example, Leet ("Leetspeak" or "1337") was originally popular only among certain internet subcultures such as software crackers and online video gamers.
During the 1990s, and into the early 21st century, however, Leet became increasingly commonplace on the internet, and it has spread outside internet-based communication and into spoken languages.
This type known as internet slang has become prevalent since the early 2000s along with the rise in popularity of social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Noam Chomsky, a founder of anthropological linguistic thought, challenged structural and prescriptive grammar and began to study sounds and morphemes functionally, as well as their changes within a language over time.
[27] The 1941 film, Ball of Fire, portrays a professor played by Gary Cooper who is researching and writing an encyclopedia article about slang.