Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others?

What constitutes "bad" language? Is it slang? Curse words? In this academic volume, Battistella, a professor of English, examines language's relationship to social conditions and constraints and argues for relativism in looking at language. He maintains that hard-nosed, traditional ideas about what is "good" and what is "bad" are open to debate, and that labeling English as either "good" or "bad" is simplistic and unnecessary. Battistella suggests "how we might think more productively about language.