Slang

October 22, 2010

Interview with tom Dalzell, author of the book The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

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Mike Carruthers:
Slang has always been part of American language and culture.

Tom Dalzell:
One thing that slang often does is turn the world upside-down where good is bad and bad is good. So, something that's "ill" or "sick" or "bad" are all good.
 

Tom Dalzell, author of The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English...

And "square" started off meaning a good, honest outstanding citizen and now somebody who's out of step, socially inept, is a "square".

Sometimes slang words come and go and then come back again.

The word "groovy" would be one of those. It enjoyed huge popularity in the 1940's and completely died away by the time it came back in the early 60's.

And of course the media has helped to create and spread slang.

And in different generations it's different media; if you're looking at the slang of teenagers from the 1920's you're going to be looking - probably the media that spread it the most were comics. And then came radio and then came the influence of movies and television and now the Internet. Now often slang is nothing more than standard English that's given attitude. The word "awesome" is perfectly good Standard English, but in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", for example, that was probably its jump into mainstream slang just with attitude punched into that word. So the word remains and the meaning is the same but it becomes slang by the pronunciation.