Slang, writes Michael Adams, is poetry on the down low, and sometimes lowdown poetry on the down low, but rarely, if ever, merely lowdown. It is the poetry of everyday speech, the people's poetry, and it deserves attention as language playing on the cusp of art. In Slang: The People's Poetry, Adams covers this perennially interesting subject in a serious but highly engaging way, illuminating the fundamental question "What is Slang" and defending slang--and all forms of nonstandard English--as integral parts of the American language. Why is an expression like "bed head" lost in a lexical limbo, found neither in slang nor standard dictionaries?
Slang is often seen as a lesser form of language, one that is simply not as meaningful or important as its 'regular' counterpart. Connie Eble refutes this notion as she reveals the sources, poetry, symbolism, and subtlety of informal slang expressions. In Slang and Sociability, Eble explores the words and phrases that American college students use casually among themselves.
Teachers, politicians, broadcasters, and parents complain of the slang-infested language of today's teenagers. But slang has been around for centuries, always troubling those who take a purist line on the English language. In this entertaining book, Julie Coleman traces the development of slang across the English-speaking world and explores why and how it flourishes. She makes use of a marvellous array of sources, including newly available online records of the Old Bailey, machine-searchable historical newspaper collections, slang users themselves, scholarly works, and the latest tweets. It is a book guaranteed to teach you some new words that you shold never use in polite company.
English is a glorious mess of a language, cobbled together from a wide variety of sources and syntaxes, and changing over time with popular usage. Many of the words and usages we embrace as standard and correct today were at first considered slang, impolite, or just plain wrong.