The Wit's Guide to Slang

Or, secret passwords into select societies

Excerpt of artist Paul Bommer’s  The Cockney Alphabet poster, which goes Hay for Horses, Beef or Mutton, See for Miles … (et cetera here)

If you can’t wordplay by the rules, sling some slang. Why stick to prefab vocab if you’ve got something new to say?

Most of the Great Wits are strongly in favour of using any words necessary to sharpen their points. Those against slang are generally world-class curmudgeons, compilers of dictionaries, or both:

“The speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.”
— Ambrose Bierce

The beauty of English is its complete lack of a governing body. There is no Academie Anglaise to rule on what’s right, so we can all make the most of what’s left. When used correctly, slang is a public invitation to what Strunk and White memorably called “a select society of those who know better.”

“Where in English we are concerned with communicating exactly what we want to convey and nothing else, the hipster is satisfied if what he says manages to include what he means.”
— Del Close and John Brent on the 1961 comedy album How To Speak Hip

Consider the groups you can infiltrate just by knowing the secret passwords! Why, there’s:

Cowboys. Here the key is metaphors as colourful as a desert sunset, before it gets dark enough to slow down a bat. Unfurl this Tex-lexicon whilst bending elbows at your local saloon and you’ll be busier than a one-armed monkey at a flea festival and drunker than a peach-orchard sow.

“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor poetry.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Gossip columnists. Imagine having to fill acres of newsprint with the humdrum goings on of the nearly famous, day in and day out. You might start inventing long words to say nothing much, as Walter Winchell did to describe new couples as having that droopy look in their orbs, as blazing, as being plenty voom voom and yowzah, as dueting, and as having the tremors. If they were to marry, they might middle-aisle it on the merge and soon they could be infanticipating to increase the mom-and-population. But then, much to a gossip columnist’s chagrin, they might end up shrugging, unraveling, unwinding, melting the handcuffs, or simply going phfftt. Pass the Wyoming ketchup.

“I know only two words of American slang, ‘swell’ and ‘lousy.’ I think ‘swell’ is lousy and lousy is ‘swell’.”
— J.B. Priestley

Harlem gigolos. Zora Neale Hurston was both anthropologist and novelist, and she combined these callings to great effect in “Story in Harlem Slang.” She describes hard-heads and frail eels who wouldn’t give you air if you was stopped up in a jug (so don’t go beating up your gums), and she chases the story with a glossary. A nice couplet for an easy victory: 

“I shot him lightly and he died politely.”

Hinterland TV characters. Slang is a key tool for world building, right up there with superglue and rocks. Some of the great TV series of our time, the ones that make you feel like you’re dropping in on a self-contained universe, have developed their own uncouth languages. The more remote the setting, the more extensive the euphemisms for sex, drugs, and bathroom activities. On Reservation Dogs, shitasses don’t snag, so skoden. On Letterkenny, you hundo p better sort yourself out before a donnybrook. 

“A figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.”
—  G.K. Chesterton

Jive cats. “Oh stewardess, I speak jive,” the elderly white woman says in Airplane!, a memorable callout to the 1940s bebop vernacular that blended wit and nonsense into a language so colourful it bleeds off the visible spectrum. In Swing It: An Annotated History of Jive, Bill Milkowski collects Dizzy Gillespie’s “Oop-bop sh’bam a-kluga-mop,” Joe Carroll’s “Oo-shoo-be-do-be-oo”, and Babs Gonzales’ “Oop-pop-a-da.” Gonzales was born Lee Brown but changed his name “because they was Jim Crowing me in ofay¹ hotels,” and he said “only my real close people know my expubidence.” Expubidence was another Gonzales original, a word he defined as “inherent talents, charm and personal charisma.” All of which are at the root of jive lines like “Romance without finance is a nuisance” (Tiny Grimes) and “I’m like a one-eyed cat, peeping in a seafood store” (Big Joe Turner).

“To join the throng, you’ve got to make your own song.”
— Lester Young

Pedants. The trick here is to use no slang whatsoever. Perhaps do not even use a contraction, no matter how much you would like to do so! As Fred Vincy observed in Middlemarch:

“Correct English is the slang of prigs.”
— George Eliot

Fittingly, it’s hard to find a definitive definition of slang. The difference between jargon and slang seems to depend on your social status: It’s jargon if it’s language you don’t understand but slang if it’s language you don’t like. 

“Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work.”
— Carl Sandberg

Jonathon Green, the world’s leading boffin² of lingo, describes slang as the counter language, a jackanapes' lexicon of the dispossessed, the language that says no. 

To which the wit says no, totally, which means both yes and no. Because when you know the words, you no better. 

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Quote Vote

“A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.”
— Edith Sitwell

Every week you sling, I slang and together we slung. We’ve snubbed snobs and demoed democracy. Where to next?

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Speaking of…

Secret societies

The internet is one big in-joke

Harlem anthropology

Zora Neale Hurston's oracular vernacular

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That was Get Wit Quick No. 176, and we didn’t even get to diner slang like cow paste (butter), boiled leaves (tea), balloon juice (seltzer), Adam’s ale (water), guess water (soup), and belly furniture (food). The Queen’s English is now the King’s English, but if you’re caught up on The Crown, that’s just another argument in favour of slang. My 2014 book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting didn’t not use contractions. Whether you call it a chimer, clock, horse and cart, or jam tart, please tap the ❤️  below.

1. “ofay n. (also fay, fey, ofey, oofay) [ety. unknown. Links to Fr. au fait, aware, have been dismissed (though Cohen (ed.), Studies in Slang (1997), sees this as the proper ety.), and doubts are also cast on Yoruba ofe, ‘a charm that lets one jump so high as to disappear’, thus trouble (the cause of such vanishing), thus a white man (the essence of trouble); note Mezzrow & Wolfe, Really the Blues (1946): ‘Ofay, of course, is pig Latin for foe.’ (Cohen rejects this — ‘there is no indication of blacks ever engaging in the Pig Latin type of word play’)} [late 19C+] (US) a usu. derog. term for a white person.”
— from Jonathon Green’s Cassell Dictionary of Slang

2. “boffin n. (also boff) [ety. unknown, although according to Robert Watson-Watt (1892-1973), the inventor of radar, the term ‘has something to do with an obsolete type of aircraft called the Baffin, something to do with that odd bird, the Puffin’ (Three Steps to Victory, 1957)} [1940s+] any form of scientific expert, orig. those RAF scientists who were working on radar.”
— from Jonathon Green’s Cassell Dictionary of Slang