A brief overview of American Slang.

Historically, linguists split into two camps on slang. One camp classed it as offal--"the grunt of the human hog," Ambrose Bierce wrote in his dictionary. The other saw proletarian poetry--a product of "the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity," wrote Walt Whitman. Uncut diamonds glisten amid the forests of sexual metaphor and bogs of scatology, refracting light back into ages gone by.

Readers who time-travel through the word apple, for example, will find that it can mean a horse dropping (1800), or a person (1887), or a saddle horn (1915), or a grenade (1918), or a baseball (1919), or a football (1974), or a basketball (1980), or the Adam's apple (1922), or a woman's breast (1942), or a weakly or inaccurately bowled ball (1966), or a soft, billed cap (1966), or a barrack ship (1971) or an American Indian who has adopted the values of white American society (1980).

In letter B, the browser enters a cultural highway of sinewy and sensuous "big" entries that stretches from New York, Big Apple (1909), to Chicago, Big Wind (1944), with 138 stops along the way, among them Big Blue (1984--IBM), Big Board (1934--New York Stock Exchange), Big Chill (1984--"an unfortunate or depressing state of affairs; death," from 1983 movie title), Big D (1930--Dallas), Big Ditch (1825--the Erie Canal), Big Easy (1970--New Orleans), big hair (1988--long hair worn teased and sprayed), big house (1913--a prison), big nickel (1929--$500 or $5,000), big pond (1833--the Atlantic), Big Red Machine (1989--the Cincinnati Reds baseball team), big sleep (1938--death, from title of Raymond Chandler novel), big-ticket (1945--high-priced). "Big" words meaning "an important person" include bigwig (1703), big-bug (1817), big gun (1834), big fish (1836), big toad (1846), big potato (1884), big casino (1893), big Ike (1902), big stick (1908), big stuff (1911), big cheese (1914), big boy (1924), big shot (1927), big wheel (1927), big rod (1929), big number (1942), big daddy (1948), big hat (1952), big boot (1969), big enchilada (1973) and big banana (1984).

Slang supplies more than 10 percent of the words the average American knows. Yet it has been considerably neglected by scholars. Part of the hang-up (1952) is the mistaken belief that slang words have shorter life spans than June bugs (even the Random House Webster's College Dictionary says slang is "more ephemeral than ordinary language"). "People say, 'Oh, slang. There is no point in collecting it. It is out of date as soon as it exists,'" says Jesse Sheidlower, Random House editor for the Slang Dictionary. "Which is manifestly untrue."

Slang research shows that many slang words are older than most people would guess. Groovy, for instance, dates not from the 1960s but from the 1930s. Wimp wasn't originated by Reaganites badmouthing (1941) George Bush; it's been around since the 1920s. Out of sight (the height of excellence) goes back to the 1890s; sweat it out to the 1860s. The slang use of man ("Hey, man, this is the '60s!") is found in Shakespeare. The word gay (the sense that means male homosexual) is not a 1950s coinage, as most dictionaries indicate. The dictionary traces it to the 1930s.

A serious slang research would also help to deep six (1949) another widespread notion about slang: that a great many words now regarded as standard English started out as slang. Some slang terms have achieved acceptance in formal English--bamboozle (1703), flabbergast (1772), blizzard (1859), guy (1875) and GI (1939) are a few examples. Yet most slang remains slang, no matter how widely used. And some words start out as standard English only to sink into the linguistic demimonde. In the Middle Ages, when more polite synonyms were scarce, the commonest four letter word for excrement was standard English. It was banished to the barnyard as refinement flowered (excrement is Latin. Ergo, it is refined).

Misconceptions abound even about what slang is. "The general public uses the word for anything an English teacher might oppose--anything new or odd," says J.E. Lighter, the chief editor of the American Slang Dictionary and almost a one-man band in bringing it about (box, Page 63). Lighter defines slang by the motives behind its creation: "It is very unusual for a standard English word to have a powerful anti-Establishment atmosphere around it. But that is the essence of slang." Slang has an in-your-face! (1976) quality ranging from the satirical to the cynical. It strips the world to its skivvies (1918), laying bare humanity's knobby knees and fallen arches. Freighted with nuance, it is language with an attitude (1962). At its worst, it is "stupidly coarse and provocative," as Lighter concedes. At its best, it makes standard English seem pallid in its play-it-safe neutrality--"standard English" being what teachers, editors, writers and other Establishment figures deem proper for formal use. Standard English calls military leaders officers, slang calls them brass (1864). Standard English speaks of the country, slang of the sticks (1905). In standard English, people go to bed, sleep or snore; in slang, they hit the sack (1942) or saw wood (1855).

The term slang itself came along in the 18th century from unknown origins. Samuel Johnson, who believed the English language to be "perfect," did not deign even to list the word in his famous 1755 dictionary. Noah Webster included it in his in 1828, but defined it unsympathetically as "low, vulgar unmeaning language." The concept of slang predates the word by 200 years. In the 16th century, the London literati found that beggars, cut-purses and other members of the underworld had created their own idiom. That tiny rivulet of words (an estimated 200) has since grown into a vast river of perhaps 100,000 words worldwide. A great many of those words have been spawned by subcultures the military, high school and college kids, sportswriters and athletes, musicians, African-Americans, factory workers, drug users.

For these and a couple dozen other subcultures, the creation and use of slang is a solidarity ritual. The new soldier, the new kid on campus, the new assembly-line worker--all learn the lingo of their new domain to show that they fit in, while old-timers revel in talking the talk because it buttresses their sense of self and demarcates their status. "One of the things you are saying when you use a lot of slang," says Lighter, "is that your perception of the world is rather different from someone else's, from your parents or those outside your group, or whoever, and you like this. You want to enjoy this difference."

Even outside the subcultures, many people use slang to advertise an anti Establishment stance that suits their temperament. They may see it as a "truer" form of communication than standard English. Its arsenal of insult can vent anger with merciless economy. One other thing: It is fun. John Algeo, a longtime professor of English at the University of Georgia and perhaps America's leading expert on new words, says language was "probably humanity's first play toy. Slang is a form of popular play. Anybody can do it, and I think a great many people do."

Only a few slang terms have been traced to individuals. Columnist Walter Winchell was credited with making whoopee (1929), the staff of Variety with disk jockey, turkey, flack, lay an egg and nabe and Tom Wolfe with flak-catcher (1970). The overwhelming majority of slang words sprout unseen, like toadstools after a rain, pushed up into general usage by anonymous creators. Algeo believes ordinary people make words all the time--a tiny fraction of which take root. "Often a family will invent or evolve new words, sometimes mistakes of children, sometimes some kind of in-joke. That is not different in principle from the invention of any other kind of new word where the motive is not that you need a name for something which has no name but that you want a name which will somehow express your attitude toward the thing or toward the people you're using it with or toward yourself."

Slang has spiced American life ever since colonial times, when you could go to a grogshop and get stew'd, or boozy, or cock-ey'd. Or whatever was your pleasure--there were 200 slang terms for drunkenness (the full list was printed by Ben Franklin in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737). The spread of slang was handicapped in the 18th and 19th centuries by editors and literary lions who condemned it as a corrupting influence on civilization, by swarms of schoolmarms who ratified the malediction and by the slowness of communications.

These restraints dissolved early in the 20th century. America was soon turning into the great factory of slang it is today. Romanticism gave way to realism in literature, flooding the country with novels and short stories crammed with true-to-life dialogue (although printing four-letter words would remain verboten until after World War II). Hollywood was feeding slangy chitchat to enraptured millions even before the movies and Garbo learned to talk. Newspapers and magazines cast off their high-button-shoe starchiness and adopted breezier styles, receptive to the slang of each era.

In the 1920s, Prohibition glamorized gangsters, teaching underworld slang to the law abiding--fence (1698), gun moll (1908), flatfoot (1912), etc. In the 1930s, words from black English moved into the mainstream as African-Americans migrated out of the South and swing bands heated up the nightclubs. In later decades, hippies, homosexuals, CB-radio users and other subgroups with their own pungent lingos seized the media's interest at one time or another.

The two world wars and lesser conflicts, meanwhile, were inoculating much of the male population with the hard-boiled slang of the soldier, the sailor and the flyboy (1937). World War I popularized bump off, leatherneck, foxhole and many, many other words; World War II spread an even larger lexicon, much of which remains in widespread use today, including boondocks, snafu, goof up, foul up, buy it and pissed off. Vietnam yielded an especially ugly crop of coinages and rediscoveries, matching the mood of the grunts (1961). Among favorites were zap, waste and gook (the last a gross insult in use in the services at least since 1920).

For much of U.S. history, indeed, slang has been largely a male thing. In 1868, a women's magazine, the Ladies' Repository, voiced a common view: "If it were not for our women there would be danger of having our English smothered in slang. They seldom use it--a well-bred woman never uses it." Little wonder. All those words for tippling and coupling, for the private regions of the female form, all those metaphors like cookie and tart equating women with food, usually oversweet baked goods.

Nowadays, however, increasing numbers of women sling slang without compunction. Ask a Valley girl. Or ask Connie Eble, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Eble has collected slang for many years from the largely female classes she teaches, made up of future English teachers. Slang terms fall easily from her students' young lips. Sorority slang includes: to suicide (for a rushee to write down only one sorority when stating her preferences); ax-queen (a sorority member who dislikes all prospective pledges); VNB (short for a rushee who is "very nice but" we don't want her); diamond in the rough (a rushee no member knows). The emergence of women in varsity athletics, Eble says, is exposing them to locker-room slang, and they are using it.

A quarter century of R-rated films and raunchy lyrics intent on showing how people really talk has affected the way people really talk. For the worse. In the 19th century, it was customary to resort to blasphemy when you truly wanted to shock. Between World War I and World War II, blasphemy faded and obscenity became the mode of choice for giving grievous offense. Now, obscenity is losing its potency and ethnic epithets, which could be used rather openly into the 1950s, are the new thermonuclear taboos. Lighter believes that if any controversy flares over the content of slang, it will not be over its four-letter words but over its many ethnic epithets. Professor Eble says that if she used "the F word" to tell her students that they had messed up on a test, "my class would not bat an eye." If she used a racial epithet in any context, however, "I'd never be forgiven." At the University of Michigan, someone stole a computer password and sent a racial diatribe onto Internet under the school's logo, causing a furor. Richard Bailey, Michigan professor of English and author of Images of English, a history of attitudes toward the language, cites the incident as evidence of the eternal impulse that much slang embodies, the impulse to hurl a horse apple "in the punch bowl. ... It seems we need something to shake the pillars of civilization."