The Use of Slang

Everyone hates slang until it becomes what we call “ordinary” language.

If you think it’s a modern problem, you’d be wrong: ‘slang’ has existed for as long as spoken language has drawn breath. The word “jazz”, for instance. When it first appeared around 1912, it wasn’t the name of a music genre at all. It likely evolved from the slang term jasm, meaning energy or intensity – a far cry from the smooth brass and quartet clubs we associate with the word today.

Many words we now consider perfectly ordinary once belonged to informal speech and subcultures. In other words, language is a living, breathing, ever-evolving thing; it changes constantly because it is inherently diachronic.

But society, as usual, has a remarkable case of amnesia: by the time they become part of the vernacular, the history of these words as slang is forgotten. Slang, like fashion trends, has a high mortality rate!

But every once in a while, something interesting happens: modern language accepts a word that has survived against the odds like a stray kitten. Eventually, people begin using it without realizing it was considered slang at all.
And as new slang terminology comes into use, everyone begins complaining about the deterioration of language, when in reality, it is simply changing with time.

Stagnant Language = Dead Language

Typically if any dialect or language is stagnant – when it ceases to evolve – it is highly susceptible to dying. It might still be used in formal, religious, or academic contexts (like Latin and Sanskrit), but it no longer has native speakers passing it down naturally.

When a group of people wants to describe something new – a feeling, a social situation, an inside joke – they rarely reach for a perfectly formal word. Instead, they invent one. Sometimes it’s a metaphor. Sometimes it’s a shortened phrase. Sometimes it’s a word that sounds amusing enough to spread.
Give teenagers 15 minutes and a group chat and they’ll invent an entire dialect.

Semantic Shift

The word “nice” originates from the Latin word nescius. It originally meant “ignorant” or “foolish”, but its connotation shifted gradually, and it now refers to something pleasant or agreeable.

Linguists call this a semantic shift. Words, it turns out, are surprisingly flexible – give them a couple decades’ use and they can often mean something entirely different from what they started with.

The word “villain” was simply used to describe… an inhabitant of a villa or farm, originating from the Anglo-Norman French vilain, which referred to a feudal peasant or serf.
(I guess somewhere along the way, farmers received a spectacularly bad rebranding…)

Language has survived wars, empires, and the invention of Twitter. It will probably survive the word “rizz”.