INVENTION OF SLANG Among the impulses which lead to the invention of slang, the two most important seem to be the desire to secure increased vivacity and the desire to secure increased sense of intimacy in the use of language. Slang originates and flourishes best in the soil of the colloquial speech. On this level a slang word or phrase may attain a very wide currency, like nut, bean, and similar terms for head, but if such a word passes into literary use it ceases to be slang. The verb walk, for example, comes from Anglo-Saxon wealcan, meaning to roll, and it is not an unreasonable as sumption that it comes by the way of a slang extension of the older term. This notion of locomotion by means of the legs seems to have something peculiarly appealing to the fancy of language innovators; cf. beat it, vamoose, mosey, saunter, skidoo, slide, slip, slope, and other metaphorical extensions. The word pot boiler used for work done for a livelihood bears the marks of slang origin. But the word is not now notable or striking. The phrase go to pot, "go to ruin," is also of doubtful origin, and the word pot in this phrase may not have been the same to begin with as the word pot, "vessel." It suggests the modern phrase, in the soup, of similar meaning.
An element of humour is almost always present in slang, usually as humorous exaggeration. Thus to call a hat a lid is amusing because it puts a hat and a pot-lid in the same class. So when an alluring woman is called a vamp, from vampire. Slang is rarely or never bitter in its implied judgments. It places things in their proper places with a smile. When a male charmer is called sheik and the sheik's female counterpart sheba, this is obviously the language of a world that takes its passions lightly.
of these slang words may have an onomatopoeic colour, like biff, "a blow," flummox, "disconcert," flabbergast, of similar meaning, but, if so, the associations are frequently slight and remote. On a still lower rhetorical level come abbreviations employed as casual adornments of colloquial conversation, like sec for second, as Wait a sec, or ever so. Perhaps, the lowest level is reached in language mutilations like ciricutous for circuitous, pictureaskew for picturesque, gust for guest. Oaths on the other hand scarcely fall within the limits of inclusion of slang. In their origins they usually accompany a more powerful emotional experience than that which produces slang. Certain inventive geniuses, however, produce oaths which have a good deal of the playfulness and ingenuity of slang.
Slang develops most freely in groups with a strong realiza tion of group activity and interest, and groups without this sense of unity, e.g., farmers, rarely invent slang terms. The stage, prizefighting, baseball, football, and other sports are productive of an extraordinarily rich crop of slang. The language of many newspaper correspondents who write about sports is often unintel ligible except to the initiated. School boys and college students also invent slang freely, and the slang of one school will often be quite different from that of another school. It is possible to have a fashionable as well as a vulgar slang. In Swift's Complete Col lection of genteel and ingenious Conversation (1738), many of the fashionable slang terms of the day are ridiculed and con demned, and almost any novel of modem "smart" society will provide numerous illustrations. An element of secrecy sometimes enters into this use of the group language. School boys thus invent a secret language of their own.
Many of the terms that pass current in cultivated conversa tion have a good deal of the colour of slang. Among such terms are the words like awful, terrible, horrid, lovely.