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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 & 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 population 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 that word
remains and the meaning is the same but it becomes slang by
the pronunciation.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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