Once the language of thieves and beggars, slang is an ever present part of today's culture for people across the strata. It allows us to connect to others, to express otherwise guarded thoughts, and to convey humor in the everyday. But how did slang escape its stigma as the language of the streets and integrate itself so seamlessly with "standard English?"
Vulgar, Sentimental, and Liberal Criticism F. J. Furnivall and T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare and Chaucer.
The ‘‘ordinary emotional person, experiencing a work of art, has a mixed critical and creative reaction. It is made up of comment and opinion, and also new emotions . . . vaguely applied to his own life. [For this] sentimental person . . . a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions which have nothing to do with that work of art whatever, but are accidents of personal association.’’
The merit of Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has been long and universally acknowledged. But its circulation was confined almost exclusively to the lower orders of society: he was not aware, at the time of its compilation, that our young men of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate; and he therefore conceived it superfluous to incorporate with his work the few examples of fashionable slang that might occur to his observation.
