Substandard-Bearer

By Jesse Birnbaum

What kind of cockamamie lingo is slang anyway? Samuel Johnson railed against it, complaining about the corrupting influence on the English language of what in his day was called cant. Daniel Defoe hated it. Noah Webster, in his 1828 American Dictionary, defined slang as "low, vulgar, unmeaning." And in all the years since, legions of teachers have tried to eradicate it.

Well, forget about it, Bubby. Slang may be substandard, the stepsister of Standard English, but it has enlivened the language for centuries. It is so deeply embedded in the daily life of Americans that no amount of bad-mouthing or mouthwashing by box-headed double-domes, drelbs, brainos and chuckleheads can give it the bum's rush. Though it does not belong in "correct" literary or conventional usage, except when employed for effect, it is wonderfully expressive and endlessly inventive.

It was an appreciation of slang's pungency that led Jonathan E. Lighter to begin collecting examples of street talk as a teenager. Now 45 and a research associate in the English department of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Lighter has launched the first of a planned three-volume Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang ($50), 1,080 pages teeming with more than 20,000 entries and etymologies, along with an illuminating survey. Volume I runs from a (as in a pig's a) through g (as in gytch, v., to steal); the second installment is due in 1996, the third in 1997 (although this sort of timetable tends to be iffy).

Lighter observes that distinctions between "good" and "bad" English were virtually nonexistent before the mid-17th century, when the first dictionaries were issued. Words and phrases that are today considered vulgar expressions for bodily and sexual functions were once common currency among men and women of all classes. The King James version of the Bible referred in Leviticus to "stones" (for testicles); the Second Book of Kings used the common four- letter word for urine. Chaucer deployed 200 separate oaths in Canterbury Tales. And did anybody give a fiddler's intercourse about the proprieties? Dreck no! There weren't any proprieties. Everybody was vulgar; so nobody was vulgar.

It was with the onset of the English Restoration in 1660, when public literacy began to flower, that notions about the language started to change. The criminal classes and otherwise illiterate people evolved their own argot to serve as both a private code and a subversive nose-thumbing at the Establishment, and it was to guard against this verbal pollution that writers and critics like Johnson tried to formulate proscriptions aimed at purifying "the King's English."

It didn't work, and slang has gone garbonzo ever since. In the U.S. alone, thousands of vivid new words -- from the rude to the crude to the lewd -- have slipped into (some would say assaulted) the language. Most of the new vocabulary has come fromdiscrete groups for whom a special jargon affords status and protection: students (barf), blacks (jazz, originally to copulate), the military (blow it out your barracks bag), alcohol user (crocked), drug user (crackhead) and the underworld (grifter).

Some modern terms are not as new as one might think. Teenagers who grope (fondle) may be surprised to learn that lovers were groping in the 14th century. Blacks who believe that bad (for good) is freshly minted will find its coinage dates to 1897. In early-18th century England, a female prostitute was gay; not until the 1930s did gay begin to become associated with male homosexuality.

Other slang words are truly contemporary. Robert Bork, the hapless federal judge who got clobbered by political opponents when he was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, may take some grudging satisfaction in finding himself memorialized as a verb: to bork is to "attack systematically, especially in the media." Granny dumping, "the abandonment of an elderly person," is another term of recent vintage (1991).

Inevitably, the bulk of Lighter's entries is concerned with scatology, illicit behavior, drunkenness, sex and genitalia. About 12 pages are given over to what is undoubtedly the most frequently used obscenity in the English tongue, the ever versatile F word. No other slang expression approaches it in its variety of permutation, application, hyphenation and intensification (e.g., unf -- -- -- ingbelievable). In its earliest recorded use (late 15th century), this word was possibly already taboo, says Lighter, who found it in a rhyming couplet written in cipher. The dictionary is rife with other synonyms for copulation; some are splendidly ingenious (for example, to have one's greens); most, however, are unprintable.

The human backside also gets a dozen pages. It is instructive to realize that a man can be so stupid that he doesn't know his a -- -- from a musket (earliest citation, 1862), his elbow, a hole in the ground, a stalk of bananas, a hot rock, Mammoth Cave, a hole in the wall, third base, his left foot, pork sausage, the back side of a checkerboard, ice cream or a pitchfork.

Phrases like these -- or worse -- will probably never enter the realm of polite discourse, and perhaps that is just as well. Still, some instances of slang can gain such acceptance that they become useful as colloquialisms and even enter Standard English over time -- for example, blizzard, disk jockey and gadget.

This lexicon is a remarkable demonstration of the resilience and resourcefulness of English as it constantly enriches and renews itself. Volume I is galluptious testimony to this. The completed work promises to be one gollywhopper of a dictionary.