Vulgarisms

Slang

The most stylistically interesting phenomenon is slang. It is difficult to define slang because of its great scope and variety. The American poet, Carl Sandburg, defines slang figuratively: "Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work". Prof. V.A.Maltzev speaks of slang as "an exercise of wit and humour", "a jesting language" that "takes nothing seriously", "is alien to pomposity", and "eases the way for smoother social contacts".

To feel the stylistic load of slang, let us consider some triple oppositions of slang, colloquial, and neutral words:

Slang	Colloquial	Neutral
bird	chap	man
croake	doc	doctor
fish	wrapper	newspaper
pig	bobby	policeman

Slang tends to be invented by men, not by women, and by the poor, not by the rich. It is used not only for fun - it can be the symbol of social protest or rebel (the slang of teenagers, college students, the underworld etc.). Slang is non-standard vocabulary understood and used by the whole nation. Slang is sometimes described as the language of sub-cultures or the language of the streets. Linguistically, slang can be viewed as a sub-dialect. It is hardly used in writing - except for stylistic effect. People resort to slang because it is more forceful, vivid and expressive than standard usages. Slangy words are rough, often scornful, estimative and humorous. They are com­pletely devoid of intelligence, moral, virtue, hospitality, sentimentality and oth­er human values.

Slang prefers short words, especially monosyllables.

However, the vast majority of slangy words and expressions are neither taboo, vulgar, derogatory, nor of­fensive in meaning, sound, or image. Picturesque metaphor, metonymy, hy­perbole and irony make slangy words spicy. Look how long, diverse and ex­pressive the chain of slangy synonyms denoting "money" is: ackers, cly, cole, gelt, moo, moolah, mopus, oof, spondulicks, queer, boot, chuck, hardstuff, lettuce, lolly, boodle, sea-coal, green goods, hay, shoestring, ante, bread, ducats, dumps, swag, bean, blunt, crap, dough, haddock, ochre, rubbish, salad, soap, splosh, sugar, chink, gob, poke, iron, bal­sam, jack, loot, pile, wad, dust, tin, brass, fat, rocks, chips, corn, red, sand, bundle, oil, shells.

Some forms of slang change very rapidly, for various reasons.

• Teenage slang changes rapidly because people are teenagers for a short period of time. For example, in the early 1990s the term used to express enthusiastic approval was 'Ace'. Now this would be considered rather dated. It has been replaced by 'Sound' — which itself will soon be sup­planted by whatever the current teenage culture decides is appropriate.

• 'Smashing!' and 'Super!' the teenage slang of Enid Blyton stories of the 1930s and 1940s is now used to parody the period and the attitudes from which they sprang. Intrinsically however, it is no different from today's terms.

• One important function of teenage slang is to create an identity which is distinct from the general adult world. Teenagers for this reason do not generally approve of parents or teachers using their slang terms. This defeats the object of what is essentially a group 'code'.

• Thus new terms are generated every couple of years. It is interesting that the main slang items are adjectives for extreme approval or extreme disapproval.

Certain notions give more slang than others. There is a surprising amount of slang words that denote "money", "fool", "woman" etc. M.M. Makovsky (1982) calls such words "English social dialect synonyms". Guess what notion slangisms given below stand for:

At the bottom of the barrel, at the end of one's rope, beached, beanless, doughless, nothing in the kick, oofless, out, sewed up, skating on the uppers, touching bottom, unsugared, washed up.

All these words and expressions denote the concept 'penniless/ruined'.

Slang words are usually short-lived ones. In the 1960s and 1970s there appeared many new slang creations connected with drug-addiction, mass culture, sexual perversion, aggression, corruption, racial prejudice, and crime. Here are two of relatively recent coinages: grasseater 'a corrupt policeman who accepts but does not demand money', groupie ' a girl who follows on tour stars, members of rocks groups' etc. Yet there are very outdated slang expressions that are still in use. We can find in modern contexts some slang samples that can be referred the period of Chaucer:

gab 'talk, gossip', bones 'dice' (Chaucer)

beat it 'go away', broad 'good-looking woman' (Shakespeare)

Likewise, some neutral vocabulary of our times used to be slang in the past: purport, subject matter, hitch-hiker, sky-scraper, teenager, bus, cab, taxi, pub, phone,photo and others.

If we compare the amount of American and British slang, the former will rank first. It contributes greatly to the British variant of English. In reverse, it has contributions from British English as well as from different national variants of American multicultural society (Italian, Yiddish etc.).

On the whole, slang is capable of expressing most delicate nuances for which the standard language has no mode of expression. At its lowest, slang merges with vulgarisms, which are on the lowest level of social prestige - they are rejected by the moral attitude of the speech community.

Slang is used to:

- to reflect the informal and highly emotive character of oral speech;

- to give speech characteristics

As we have said before, slang is not a uniform body - it falls into special slang ("social and professional jargon"-Vorobyova) and general slang ("interjargon"). Prof. Maltzev (1984) characterizes special slang as the vocabulary typical of special segments of the population. He further streams special slang into cant, jargon, and argot. Cant is the conversational, familiar idiom used only by members of a specific occupation, trade, profession, class, age group, interest group and so on. Jargon is defined as the technical or even secret vocabulary of some social group (the so-called "shop talk"). As K.Hudson says, jargon is used mainly by intellectually inferior people. Argot is both the cant and the jargon of any professional criminal group.

Prof. Maltzev suggests skipping the word 'cant' and using the term "special slang" instead. He defines special slang as "the stock of expressive and humorous words and expressions used by some professional groups to denote things relevant in their activities, while jargon is the specialized language of different occupations and interests which is fundamentally impersonal and serious". The term "special slang" is also used by I.V.Arnold, A.D.Schweitzer and other stylisticians.

There is the special slang of service and catering, stockbrokers and casino players, manual workers, doctors, sportsmen, soldiers and members of many other special groups.

Here are some examples from US army slang:

SPECIAL SLANG: button man, brain bucket, have ants in the pants, morale booster. picture gallery, stomach robber, typewriter

NEUTRAL EQUIVALENT: soldier, steel helmet, be nervous, restless or jumpy, attractive girl, tattooed soldier, cook, machine-gun

Jargonisms are non-standard words used by people of a certain asocial group to keep their intercourse secret. There are jargons of criminals, con­victs, gamblers, vagabonds, souteneurs, prostitutes, drag addicts and the like. The use of jargon conveys the suggestion that the speaker and the listener enjoy a special "fraternity" which is closed for outsiders, because outsides do not understand the secret language. Here are some words from American and Russian drug takers' jargon: white stuff- cocaine or morphine; candy = cocaine; snifter = a cocaine addict; boxed, spaced out, bombed, junked up or charged up = being affected by drugs; candy man = drug seller; cap = a capsule with a narcotic; jab-off = an injection of a narcotic; pin-shot = an injection of a drug made with a safety pin and an eye-dropper instead of a hypodermic needle; mainliner = a drug addict who takes his narcotics by intravenous injection; ширнуться - ввести наркотик внутривенно; раскумаритъся = принять наркотик в период ломки, ломка = постнаркотическое состояние у наркоманов, которое характеризуется физическими страданиями. Social contra­dictions of our life gave rise to such word combinations as "отмазать от суда", "закосить от армии". Eventually, some Jargonisms pass into stan­dard speech. This is the case with the Russian word "беспредел" which penetrated into Standard Russian from prison jargon due to its expressive­ness and topicality of meaning.

Eric Partridge, an authority on the subject, identifies a number of reasons for the creation and use of jargon. In his opinion, people resort to jargon to be different, startling, or original; to display one's membership of a group; to be secretive or to exclude others; to enrich the stock of language; to establish a friendly rapport with others; to be irreverent or humorous.

Jargon is the specialized language used by members of a particular trade, group, or profession. In and of itself, jargon is not necessarily bad, and it is certainly natural for specialists to employ terms that outsiders might not understand. For example, while most of us associate the word holiday with a day at the beach, a hiking trip, or simply a day when we can sleep late, to a house painter the word means a spot on the wall that his brush missed. This is an inoffensive use of jargon, one that the reader could probably fig­ure out from the context. The computer revolution has introduced many terms into the language that are properly part of computer jargon, such as interface which is often used to describe what two people do when they talk to each other. Input is commonly used to describe a suggestion. A professor at Rutgers University, Ross Baker, has written a parody of the first line of the Declaration of Independence, using computerese: "When at a given point in time in the human-events cycle, the phase-out of political relation­ships is mandated, a clear signal needs to be communicated to the world as to why we are putting independence on-line." (Quoted in Donald Hall's arti­cle, "A Fear of Metaphors," New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1985.)

At its best, jargon is useful, providing a verbal shorthand between two people, both of whom are fluent in the terminology and subject. At its worst, jargon is infuriating because the reader knows that the writer is unable to communicate even the simplest idea in clear prose. A good way to grasp the misuse and abuse of modern language is to read the following piece by Russell Baker, the political writer whose column is syndicated widely in American newspapers. Baker has rewritten the fairy tale, "Little Red Rid­ing Hood," in order to poke fun at the worst aspects of modern English— Pompous language, the inflated diction of bureaucrats and politicians, and academic jargon. In an effort to make the classics accessible to contemporary readers, I am translating them into modern American language. Here is the illustration of “Little red Riding Hood”. (Russel Baker, Little Red Riding Hood Revisited)

Jargon is used to:

- to indicate the social standing of the character;

- to indicate the profession of the character

I.R.Galperin defines vulgarisms as expletives or swear-words as well as obscene words and expressions. Expletives convey different negative emotions such as annoyance, anger, vexation and so on. There are different degrees of vulgarity in them, the word bloody heading the list of the so-called bl-words. They often function as vulgar intensives:

blame (You know blame well); blankety (a blankety lie); bleeding (bleedin' drunk); blinking (What blinking good are we?); blistering (a blistering idiot); blooming (he's blooming slow), etc.

Obscenities (euphemistically known as "four-letter" or "taboo" words) until recently have been considered unspeakable, unprintable and not recognized in common dictionaries. They refer to parts of the human body, excretory functions, and sexual matters. Taboo words were often replaced by euphemisms in the mid-Victorian era. E.g.

the departed 'the dead',

women in an interesting condition 'pregnant women', etc.

Things have changed since those days - modern authors endow their character's speech with the dirtiest swearings and obscenities having no apparent public or editorial censure. Vulgar or obscene words may be viewed as part of slang. The most popular images of slang are food, money, sex and sexual attraction, people's appearances and characters. Because it is not standard, formal or acceptable under all conditions, slang is usually considered vulgar, impolite, or boorish.

Prof. Screbnev distinguishes lexical vulgarisms and stylistic vulgarisms. Lexical vulgarisms are words expressing ideas considered unmentionable in civilized society. Indecencies are usually expressed by various euphemistic substitutes, abbreviations, omissions (dashes). It is the lexical meaning of such words that is vulgar. For examples: damned, bloody, son-of-a-bitch, four-letters words.

Stylistic vulgarisms are words and phrases, the lexical meanings of which have nothing indecent or improper. Stylistic connotations of these words express derogatory attitude of the speaker towards the object of speech (low slang). E.g.: old bean = old man; smeller = nose’ pay dirt = money.

Vulgarisms are used to:

- to give speech characteristics;

- to express strong emotions, anger, annoyance, etc.

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