A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 293
If words sometimes go downhill, they also undergo the opposite process, known as
regeneration. Words like budge, coax, nonplus, shabby, squabble, stingy, tiff, touchy,
wobbfy, which were recorded with proper disparagement by Dr. Johnson, have since
passed into the standard speech. In the eighteenth century snob and sham were slang, but
in the nineteenth they attained respectability, the former word partly through the
influence of Thackeray. The word sturdy originally meant harsh, rough, or intractable.
We now use it in a wholly complimentary sense. Even the word smock, which was
mentioned above as losing caste in the eighteenth century, has now been rehabilitated as
applied to an outer garment. We use it for a certain type of woman’s dress and we speak
of an artist’s smock. The changes of meaning that words undergo are but another
evidence of the constant state of flux that characterizes the living language.
225. Slang.
All the types of semantic change discussed in the preceding paragraph could be
illustrated from that part of the vocabulary which at any given time is considered slang. It
is necessary to say “at any given time” not only because slang is fleeting and the life of a
slang expression likely to be short, but also because what is slang today may have been in
good use yesterday and may be accepted in the standard speech of tomorrow. Slang has
been aptly described as “a peculiar kind of vagabond language, always hanging on the
outskirts of legitimate speech, but continually straying or forcing its way into the most
respectable company.” 5 Yet it is a part of language and cannot be ignored. One of the
developments that must certainly be credited to the nineteenth century is the growth of a
more objective and scientific attitude toward this feature of language. The word slang
does not occur in Johnson’s Dictionary. It first occurs a few years later and in its early
use always has a derogatory force. Webster in 1828 defines it as “low, vulgar, unmeaning
language.” But the definition in the Oxford Dictionary, expressing the attitude of 1911, is
very different: “Language of a highly colloquial type, below the level of standard
educated speech, and consisting either of new words, or of current words employed in
some special sense.” Here slang goes from being “unmeaning language” to having a
“special sense,” and it is treated frankly as a scientific fact.
One reason why slang cannot be ignored even by the strictest purist is that it has not
infrequently furnished expressions that the purist uses without suspecting their origin.
Even students of language are constantly surprised when they come across words that
they use naturally and with entire propriety but find questioned or condemned by writers
of a generation or a few generations before. The expression what on earth seems to us an
idiomatic intensive and certainly would not be objected to in the speech of anyone today.
But De Quincey condemned it as slang and expressed horror at hearing it used by a
government official. The word row in the sense of a disturbance or commotion was slang
in the eighteenth century and described by Todd (1818) as “a very low expression,” but
5
Greenough and Kittredge, Words and Their Ways in English Speech (New York, 1901),S p.55.