[lit-ideas] How Slangy Can Grice Get
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- Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 12:22:18 -0400
A running commentary on "Slang for the Ages", a recent essay by K. Stamper
in the NYT:
"Everyone knows that slang is informal speech, usually invented by reckless
young people, who are ruining proper English."
I think K. is being ironic; since there is a hyperbolic use of 'everyone'
and 'all' -- Grice's example: "Every nice girl loves a sailor" ("The use of
this type of hyperbole is NOT refuted, _contra_ Popper, by the odd
counterexample: perhaps the girl that is alleged NOT to love a sailor ain't
nice
after all").
K. S. goes on:
"These obnoxious upstart words are vapid and worthless, say the guardians
of good usage, and lexicographers like me should be preserving language that
has a lineage, well-bred words with wholesome backgrounds, rather than
recording the modish vulgarities of street argot."
I suppose it depends on what street. There are streets, and there are
avenues, and in England, there are roads, and lanes, and ways.
It's odd that in New York, streets are horizontal, while avenues are
vertical. (Depending where you're coming from, of course).
K. S. goes on:
"In fact, much of today’s slang has older and more venerable roots than
most people realize.Take “swag.” As a noun (“Check out my swag, yo / I walk
like a ballplayer” — Jay Z), a verb (“I smash this verse / and I swag and
surf” — Lil Wayne), an adjective (“I got ya slippin’ on my swag juice” —
Eminem), and even as an interjection (“Say hello to falsetto in three,
two, swag” — Justin Bieber), swag refers to a sense of confidence and style."
"It’s slangy enough that few dictionaries have entered it yet."
And it's Griceian enough to trigger the odd implicature.
K. S. goes on:
"Swag sounds new, but the informal use goes way back. It’s generally taken
to be a shortened form of the verb “swagger,” which was used to denote a
certain insolent cockiness by William Shakespeare, O.G."
"The adjectival use dates to 1640, and seems to have a similar connotation
to the modern swag (“Hansom swag fellowes and fitt for fowle play” — John
Fletcher and Philip Massinger, in “The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden
Barnavelt”). The noun was first used even earlier: one 1589 citation reads like
an Elizabethan attempt at freestyle (“lewd swagges, ambicious wretches”).
Nor was Mr. Bieber the first to use the word because he liked how it
finished a line. The English playwright William Davies wrote, in 1786, of one
of
his characters that she moved like a half-full
“cask set in motion, swag, swag.”"
"The website Gawker prophesied in 2012, and Bieber averred last year, that
swag is over. It takes some swag to call time on a piece of slang that goes
back centuries; and, in any case, Google Trends shows that the usage is
holding steady. Swag is dead; long live swag. Swag evolved out of standard
English, but there’s also slang that is slang born and raised."
Oddly, the use of 'standard' in 'standard English' is political: it refers
to _banner_ or flag English (vide, "Standard English and its enemies").
There is no such thing as 'standard' in languages that don't have the
vernacular 'standard', and I would NOT think Alighieri would refer to his
Italian
as "standard Italian": 'standard volgare', perhaps.
K. S. goes on:
"As it [slang] moves through successive generations, it may morph — but
without losing its cred. “Fubar” was first used in print in 1943; it is an
acronym whose expanded version I will bowdlerize as “rhymes with trucked up
beyond all recognition.” This was slang created by the Greatest Generation
as Americans marched to war, a shining example of how G.I.s adapted the
custom of military acronyms to their own purposes."
And I would not be surprised if it featured in some refrain in some
marching song by the G.I.s
"Fubar had its heyday during the war, then fell out of use."
Same with some type of armament, I suppose.
"But it never disappeared entirely. Decades later, it was appropriated by
another kind of acronym-loving grunt: the computer programmer. One of the
biggest and earliest employers of programmers was the American military, and
the release of home consoles in the ’70s and ’80s meant that middle-aged
coders of the military-industrial complex were mingling — and sharing their
slang — with college-aged console hackers. Fubar became a placeholder name
for files, some of which might contain coding errors."
"Was it still slang?"
The question is philosophical, Socratic -- or as I prefer Griceian. Cfr.
Chesterton: "all metaphor is slang, and vice versa".
"Definitely," answers K. T. to the question.
"Restricted to young people? Not so much. Fubar still enjoys slang use
among the hip and Internet-savvy: in the last two years, I’ve taken citations
for Fubar from Wonkette, Gawker and the A.V. Club."
"Speaking of hip, hipsters have been derided as know-it-alls since at least
1941."
But then, either 'it' or 'all' is otiose.
"Knows all"
"Knows it".
The implicature of "knows it all" seems to presuppose that there is an
analysis to 'it' (as in "Let's do IT, let's fall in love").
K. S. goes on:
"The word “hipster” was so defined by Jack Smiley in his seminal
collection of soda-jerk slang, “Hash House Lingo.” Likewise, the word “dude”
predates the Dude of “The Big Lebowski” fame by over 100 years. Cops have been
“nailing” suspects since the early 1700s. Even the seemingly
up-to-the-minute “bae,” a word that means babe or baby and is so new that most
of its
written use is in personal communications, has a print trail back to the
early 2000s, and is probably a descendant of the reduplicative nickname Bae
Bae, a rendering of “baby,” which shows up in print in the 1990s. In some
cases, bae is older than the people using it. (It also has its own spurious
acronymic etymology, “before anyone else.”)."
"Slang often falls prey to what linguists call the “recency illusion”: I
don’t remember using or hearing this word before, therefore this word is new
(often followed by the Groucho Marx sentiment: “Whatever it is, I’m
against it”)."
There is something Griceian about the 'recency illusion', or as I prefer
the 'recency' implicature:
"I don't remember using this word before; therefore, this word is new."
Cfr. "That pillar box seems red to me; therefore it _is_ red."
K. S. goes on:
"At the heart of the illusion lies a misbegotten belief that English is a
static and uniform language, a mighty mountain of lexical stability."
As opposed to Italian?
The use of "English" to mean "Language" is Saussurean in nature (only he
used "French" -- "When I say "Language", I mean 'Langue', when I say
"language" I mean 'parole'", he said).
K. S. goes on:
"Upon this monument, slang falls like acid rain, eroding and degrading the
linguistic landscape. It’s the wrong metaphor. English is fluid and
enduring: not a mountain, but an ocean."
And so is perhaps French?
("No, they have an ACADEMY!").
"A word may drift down through time from one current of English (say, the
language of World War II soldiers) to another (the slang of computer
programmers). Slang words are quicksilver flashes of cool in the great stream.
Some words disappear, and others endure. One thing is sure: The persistence of
slang doesn’t mean that English is Fubar. In fact, it’s swag, bae."
And implicatural at heart.
Cheers,
Speranza
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