Slang. Linguistic diamonds in the rough.
67Slang
What is slang, anyway? Calling a Police Officer a cop is slang. Or is it? There are two answers to that question – The first one is, yes and the second one is, no. Both are correct. This is because of the nature of language where the first rule is that there are no rules. There are, of course, rules – lots of them; if you are a student of English, gazillions of them it seems. But, and it’s a big, ‘but’ – you can break them and it still works.
And if you doubt this, look at how often that machine you are working on tries to correct your grammer,even when what you have written makes perfecr sense. So, bear in mind - there is writing and then there is typewriting.
The question then becomes, if something still works after it has been broken is it, indeed, broken?
For instance if you are watching a gangster movie and a tough looking guy enters a scene and makes the enquiry, “Okay, Looey … where’s ‘da sparklers stashed?”, would you have to wait until you got home and consulted your Thesaurus to decipher what Big Jake meant in that scene?
Of course not, in fact the language used not only communicated the information that he was talking about diamonds being hidden, it also told us that the said diamonds were stolen.
Have you ever rented a storage unit to get rid of some of that stuff that seems to endlessly accumulate? Well, if Big Jake and Looey broke into it and stole it, it would stop being your ‘stuff’ and become their ‘stash’. If the Police recovered it and reported to you that they had tracked down Big Jake and Looey and recovered the stash you’d likely say something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s very nice … but have you found my stuff?
The Police might, at that point, tell you that your stuff was now the major piece of physical evidence against the crooks, and that it only had evidentiary value as now being Big Jake’s and Looey’s ‘stash’. Stash being, ‘being in illegal possession of other people’s stuff’. Only after Big Jake and Looey were convicted and sent ‘up the river’ and the goods were returned to you would it become ‘stuff’ again. Your stuff.
At which point, seeing it again and remembering why you put it into storage in the first place, you might well regret having ever reported it missing. Depending upon just how awful your stuff is you might even make an exception to your normal rules and become involved in a plot to break Big Jake and Looey out of prison in the hope that they might convert ‘your stuff back into ‘their stash’.
To examine this further let us go back to the word, ‘cop’ for a moment and invent a real life scenario to explore it.
There is this grandmother who baby-sits her grandson and, besides looking after his immediate physical welfare, teaches him this, that and everything as they spend their time together. Let’s say that she is old-fashioned and is not too happy with the amount of time the parents let the child watch television. She thinks that he should be given more exposure to books.
They are out walking one day when the little fellow points excitedly at a person on the street and exclaims, “Cop …” The grandmother, not too happy with this, immediately corrects him, “Police Officer …’ , she snaps, with a friendly little scowl.
I think that you would agree that both of them were right, so, why the correction? More importantly, what was being corrected? It certainly wasn’t that the child described the figure he pointed at wrongly. In fact the child’s use of language was perfect in that not only did he communicate exactly what he wanted to communicate, but the person he was communicating with fully understood him. What more can you ask?
Well maybe, as was the case with this grandmother, a little bit of what she would have termed, class. In her view she wanted her grandson to speak proper English, not slang. She said ‘tomato’ and she’d be damned if little Chuck (she called him Charles) – was going to get away with saying ‘tamateo’
Now let’s transport little Chuck and his grandmother back in time and put them in a street in London shortly after Sir Robert Peel invented the Police Force. Had little Chuck pointed at a policeman and said, “Cop …” the grandmother would have ignored it as being childish gibberish, as would everyone else, the word Cop not having been invented at the time. But still little Chuck would have been right and we can illustrate this by bring both time periods together at the same time and place. We can do this using one of the books his grandmother was so keen in exposing him to. She would have him on her lap as she turned the pages of one of the many lavishly illustrated books she made it her business to provide, and they could have easily came across a series of pictures of Old London Town, one of which had a Police Constable in it, at which point little Chuck could have piped up, pointing at it, “Cop …” And been subjected to the same little lecture, only this time the grandmother would have been wrong in saying Officer instead of Constable. But, there again, she would not have been wrong as what she was communicating was not so much an accurate title for the person, but rather admonishing him for using a title she disapproved of, accurate or otherwise. What she was really addressing was Chuck’s exposure to too much television which his usage of slang was merely a symptom of. As is true with a lot of education, it is not so much what you are being taught; it’s that you are being taught
Like when we teach children to add and subtract using apples and oranges; we are not training them to be greengrocers – we want them to become high-flying financiers. (Or Dentists or Plumbers, where the ability to handle huge amounts of money is essential.)
So, where does this place slang within the hierarchy of language? Obviously, it would appear, within the lower orders. As Chuck’s grandmother would tell you, referring to a Police Officer as ‘Cop’ is not only improper, it is ever so slightly pejorative.
Yet, if we use the notion of ‘food chain’, or , to put it another way, ‘most likely to succeed’, slang must rank quite highly as it always comes into existence after that which it is slang for, yet quite often is used more than the original and sometimes outlives it. In fact ‘food chain’ is, itself, a sort of slang for the term, hierarchy.
Hierarchy sounds like it should be written using a quill, whereas ‘food chain’ sounds like it came straight out of ‘Reservoir Dogs’.
Hierarchy is about social order; who you are over and who’s over you. Food chain is more fundamental, primitive even; it’s about who you eat and who eats you. Although both terms mean exactly the same thing, ‘hierarchy’ sounds more cultured.
If the walk Chuck and his grandmother had taken that day had happened to pass through Giza while they were building the Great Pyramid and Chuck had pointed to the hundreds of poor wretches dragging apartment-block size rocks across the desert being watched over by King Khufu sitting in a golden throne and exclaimed “Food chain …” his grandmother would likely have given him a loving clip on the ear and told him that what he was looking at was a hierarchy,stopping only to genuflect as they passed King Knuft.
A more homely example of the survivalist nature of slang is the fridge. How often do you go to the refrigerator for anything, or take your automobile out for a spin (slang for ride)
It’s everywhere, slang. We all use it all the time, yet we still tend to look down our noses at it. If language was a house, slang would be the septic tank.
Yet slang as we know it is, in itself, a sort of slang compared to what it originally referred to. What it actually meant was ‘secret language’ used by members of particular groups so that outsiders could not understand what they were saying. That was slang in its purest form.
And I was once a witness to it.
At the time I was working in the building trade in London and I knocked around with a crowd of fellow Irishmen. One Saturday night when we were having a party my friend, Sean had his younger brother with him. As the night worn on the young fellow started to get a bit out of hand. Nothing too offensive, but I could see that Sean was not best pleased. He kept glaring at his brother, but to no avail, the young fellow was up and away.
I could see that Sean was getting to a point where he would stand for it no longer. I was starting to get a bit uneasy myself, Sean was a very big man and his wee brother stood about six feet two inches, so the prospect of ructions breaking out was not a pleasant one.
Suddenly Sean jutted forward in his chair, his eyes blazing – but he didn’t rise out of it. Instead he uttered a stream of what sounded to me like guttural gibberish. He didn’t shout. He didn’t have to. I looked at his brother and what was a loud, swaying about figure became instantly still and silent, with a silence you could bottle.
The whole thing didn’t last more than twenty or so seconds, and the party was back to the normal din of people chatting and laughing. For the rest of the evening Sean’s brother seemed to be doing a first-class imitation of an alter boy.
At work the next day I asked Sean about the incident and what it was he said, and in what language. That was when he told me that he was a Traveler. He did not use that word, he just used the word ‘we’. ‘We have our own way of talking”, he explained to me. And what he’d done, using ‘that way of talking’ was to tell his brother, in no uncertain terms, just how big an eejit he was making of himself and that if he didn’t knock it off there’d be hell to pay” He further explained that he used their own way of talking so that no-one else in the room would hear just how scathing he was being, this to save the brother being utterly humiliated. Now that, if you think about it, is pretty sophisticated. An example of chastising and protecting all in one action. It had the further benefit of preventing an almighty row, because, had the whole room been privy to the dressing down the young man, big aggressive young man, was subjected to he would have felt obliged to fight to save face. But, Sean having taken care of that for him, left him free to tuck his tail between his legs and ‘get over it’.
