Did you know that the word slang actually shows up in the King James Bible? Well, it does and it doesn’t. It’s when the boy David is going up against that Philistine with the big frame and the big mouth, Goliath of Gath. “And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.” Of course, that’s not the same word as the noun. That’s just the old past tense of the verb sling. All such verbs in that class once followed the form we hear in drink, drank, drunk. The loss of that second form and its being absorbed into the third, the past participle, has been going on for several hundred years. In some verbs, the shift is complete. So nobody would now readily understand the proverb that the radical Levelers in the 17th century were fond of:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Meaning, “When Adam dug the earth and Eve spun her thread at the distaff, where were all your fine lords and ladies then?” But in many verbs the process is incomplete. “I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,” says Milton in Paradise Lost, but for American speakers that would sound informal, even slangy: we still would use the form sang, for the past tense.
Which brings me to our Word of the Week in its proper sense: slang. It’s not in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, but by the end of the 1700’s it appears to be well enough known, as the special language or patois of persons of low character. Often enough, in those early days, it’s the patois of thieves and others who want to communicate with each other and not have somebody nearby understanding what they’re talking about. Over time, many slang words do enter the language, sometimes even losing their stigma. But we do still have a lot of slang from the wrong side of the law: fuzz, box man (a safe-cracker), paperhanger (a forger), stir, shiv, clink, even, for the famous federal prison at Ossining, New York, Sing-Sing. I asked myself, “What’s the difference between slang and argot? In origin, nothing — argot was the slang of thieves in Paris in the 1800’s. How about between slang and jargon? Here Dr. Johnson’s entry is really illuminating: “Unintelligible talk; gabble; gibberish.” He doesn’t say that it’s understood by people who grew up on “the wrong side of the tracks,” as the description goes in the United States. He says that nobody can understand it.
I’ve long thought that the nose-in-the-air language of literary theorists was no more than jargon in that sense, and that the people who used it only pretended to understand what it was supposed to mean, just so they could join the inner circle — a kind of intellectual thievery, not to pick your pocket but to pickle your brains. Dr. Johnson quotes an author who says that mathematics is as clear as day to someone who understands the terms, but to someone not versed in it, it will sound like nothing but jargon. Somebody pointed out to me yesterday that the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, which I saw when I went to a ballgame at the stadium there, featuring my favorite team, the Cardinals, was not a parabola, as people think, but a catenary: the curve that the focus of a parabola will describe as the parabola is rolled along a straight line. That made my eyes light up! But it would make a lot of people’s eyes glaze over — and very smart people, too.
But we shouldn’t be too snooty when it comes to slang, at least not in popular speech, because that’s where some vigorous and muscular and eye-popping creativity comes into play. “Chock-a-block” comes from ships and their block-and-tackle arrangements. “Finagle” comes from cheating at cards — but we don’t know how. Huck Finn, when he came up against something uncanny, would say that it gave him “the fantods” — maybe from “fantasy,” but that’s only a guess. If it’s not “the fantods,” it might be “the creeps” or “the heebie-jeebies.” In English we’re also fond of rhyming slang: “hanky-panky” is from British English, meaning “trickery,” but in America, and maybe in England too for all I know, it’s used mainly for adultery or embezzlement. Hell’s bells! Once you get the engine going on slang, you’ve got to run her into the ground before she’ll stop!
Of course, sometimes a slang word grinds to a halt on its own, and disappears from the language, or is used only comically, as something absurdly obsolete. When I was a kid, it was “groovy” to use the word “groovy,” just as it was to wear plaid polyester pants, but if you use it now, you’ll mark yourself as somebody at the old folks’ home who wants to jiggle around on his cane while listening to The Rolling Stones. It’s as out of date as “hubba hubba” and “23-skidoo.” I could live without those, for sure. But I’d hate to find that all baseball slang had gone down the memory hole, because a lot of that was quite colorful. “Can of corn”? A lazy pop fly to the outfield. “Texas-Leaguer”? A softly-hit single or even double that happens to land where there ain’t nobody to catch it. “The Tools of Ignorance”? The equipment the catcher has to wear. “Chin music”? A fastball thrown deliberately right under the batter’s chin, to intimidate or defy. Some pitchers even nicknamed their favorite pitches: Randy Johnson’s slider (Mr. Snappy); Stu Miller’s daring slowball lob to the plate (the Eephus). Then there’s “pulling the string,” which makes sense if you suppose that there’s a string attached to the ball, and the pitcher can slow it down by pulling on it — hence it’s used for a pitch that fools the batter by getting him to swing too soon. I see that cricket players have their own colorful slang: the “cow corner” is the part of the field where the batsman is least likely to hit the ball — so called, I suppose, because the cows might as well be grazing out there.
How about the word itself? Where does it come from? Probably from our cousins in the Nordic countries, who after all did a lot of settling in the north of England in the Middle Ages (and in Ireland too, by the way; if your name is O’Neill, you likely have Viking blood in you, maybe even royal Viking blood). The noun came from certain uses of the verb to make compounds, such Swedish slängnamn, a “sling-name,” that is, a nickname, probably unflattering, like Fats or Slats or Stretch. In English, we say that somebody flings abuse at his opponent, but in the Nordic tongues they sling it — the idea is the same. So then, slang comes from the notion of slinging words and names around, and sometimes, like “white on rice,” as they say in Iowa, those words and names stick.
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