Slang: Similarities and Differences Between Almost a Century
Almost everybody on earth uses slang to communicate, and when you think about how often new slang words arise, it is interesting that we can look back on the slang from about a century ago and comprehend what most of the words mean. Understanding the slang, and how people spoke in history can give you a better understanding of the people in history and why they make their decisions. Slang changes a lot, but almost 100 years later and we still use and understand the majority of the slang from the 1920's. We can even see some of the slang we use today, was adapted from the 1920's. For example people nowadays often use the word "wet" to describe something good, and a common way to describe someone or something good in the 1920's was to say "all wet. 'He's all wet!'"Some of the words are exactly the same, such as when two people had a complaint or problem it would be called beef, and today you will often hear people say "they have beef about..." However as it was 95 years ago they also used slang that would never be heard anywhere today. "Copacetic" was the term to describe something wonderful, fine, or alright. Similarly in the 1920's you might heard the phrase "What's your dick doing," meaning what task did you give your private investigator, while it would mean something else today. In some cases we use the same terms as in the 1920's but they mean different things now. The term "slay," as in " you slay," today means your fierce, perfect, or on point, while in the 20's it meant your funny.
It is easier to connect, relate, and sympathize with people of history knowing something you have in common, such as slang words. History can often be hard to understand because you don't have things in common with these historical figures and therefore can't see the reasoning behind their actions. Knowing the slang of an era can help you understand the people of the era, and you can then make educated assumptions for the reasoning behind their actions.
http://local.aaca.org/bntc/slang/slang.htm
I think it's really interesting how phrases that meant one thing in the 1920's can mean something entirely different in the present day. It just shows how malleable and prone to change a language can be. I found out that saying "You slay me" is also the same as calling someone funny. Another interesting word was to "neck", which meant to kiss. I think this was in "Catcher in the Rye," which we all read in English.
ReplyDeleteI love how you chose this topic to discuss, your article was very intriguing. It's interesting how some of these slang words are passed on from generation to generation but some are just unique to a certain generation. What's interesting is that they are all words that people use in their everyday lives but they don't appear on a dictionary too often. One word I found very interesting was "clam" which meant a dollar. How do slang words come to be? Do they just work in the context of a conversation and spread over time? For our generation it's a lot easier for slang words to catch on and become popular through the use of social media.
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Your argument is very convincing and it is true that by looking at the language during a certain time period, one can deduce the conditions that people experienced back then. With this in mind, what kind of slang do you think was used during the Depression? Were there new words more focused on the depressing lifestyle that people lived? As I looked through this article, I noticed that a lot of the slang were about drugs, so maybe a lot people turned to drugs to find happiness again since the Depression had took so much:
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