Thus the common adjective of approval in Elizabethan days was fair, and in the i8th century it was elegant. Both of these terms are now archaic. A later synonym was nice, which in turn tends to be replaced by wonderful. Such counter-words are de vised for the purpose of avoiding the precise definition of mo ments which call for nothing more than a quick and general ex pression. Quite meaningless expressions are of ten utilized in this way, for example the archaic How would you like to be the ice man? or So is your old man, or What do you know about that? Here is a kind of shorthand language which enables the group to express and to realize its experiences without elaborate analysis.
Distinction must be made between technical language and this intimate colloquial language of the group which may be called slang. Some technical words in trades and professions were in the beginning probably slang words. Thus the first tailor who called his smoothing-iron a goose, probably raised a smile and certainly started a fashion in tailoring circles.
The first extensive records of Eng lish slang occur in the cant or canting language of thieves and vagabonds in the i6th century. To a certain extent this pro fessional cant of thieves was probably a secret language, but this could hardly have been the main motive in the invention of the cant. Thieves and vagabonds were a group with a strong sense of corporate unity and one also with certain sporting attitudes that would be highly favourable to the development of a class language.
In his treatise On the Excellency of the English Tongue, written about 1595, Richard Carew mentions as one of the excellences of English its ability to express the same thing in a variety of ways : "for example, when wee would be rid of one, wee vse to saye Bee going, trudge, pack, be faring, hence, awaye, shifte, and by circumlocution, rather your roome than your companye, Letts see your backe, come againe when I bid you, when you are called, sent for, intreated, willed, desiered, invited, spare vs your place, another in your steede, a shipp of salte for you, sane your credite, you are next the door, the doore is open for you, there's noe bodye holdes you, no bodie teares your sleeue, etc." No one can doubt that some of these phrases mentioned by Carew are the equiva lents of what would be called slang phrases in our day. When Chaucer wrote There been no sterres, god wot, than a paire, this suggests the modern equivalents There's more than one pebble on the beach, There's more than one tin can in the alley, etc.
The mixture of races and the general breaking of old associations which accompanied the first great western migrations were peculiarly favourable to the development of a highly flavoured colloquial style. And in general it may be said that the frontier in America, after the colonial period, has always been a border line of romance between reality and unreality in which slang expressions have made a vigorous growth.
Australia has slang probably for a similar reason, that the occu pying of the country has been in no little degree an exhilarating and romantic adventure. (See Lists: American Slang and Aus tralian Slang.
The earliest use of the word "slang" hitherto discovered occurs in Toldervy's History of Two Orphans, published in 1756. A more unequivocal instance is quoted in J. C. Hotten's Slang Dictionary (1864) from a book entitled Jonathan Wild's Advice to his Successor: "Let proper Nurses be assigned to take care of these Babes of Grace (i.e., young thieves). . . . The Master who teaches them should be a man well versed in the Cant Language, commonly called the Slang Patter, in which they should by all means excel." Four years later, in 1762, the word is found with a different and now obsolete meaning, in Foote's play The Orators. A fast young Oxford man, invited to attend a lecture on oratory, is asked, "Have you not seen the bills?" He replies, "What, about the lectures? ay, but that's all slang, I suppose." Here the word seems to be equivalent to "humbug." In the first edition of Hugh Kelly's comedy, The School for Wives, there is a passage (omitted in some of the later reprints) in which one of a company of sharpers, who pretend to be for eigners and speak broken English, says : "There's a language called slang, that we sometimes talk in. . . . It's a little rum tongue, that we understand among von another." Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) has the entry, "Slang, the cant language." It may be that the word is genuinely dialectal—an inheritance from the language of the Scandinavian settlers in the north of England—as shown by the coincidence of its uses with those of the modern Norwegian verb slengja (etymologically equivalent to the English "to sling") and related words, as given in the dic tionary of Ivar Aasen. Slengja kjef ten (literally, to sling the jaw), means to pour out abuse. The French synonym is argot.