ENGLISH | LANGUAGE
What Makes a Slang Word Useful?
Measuring the value of new words and phrases
Living outside of the Philadelphia area for most of my life, I’ve seen my fair share of slang words enter and leave the fray. Some of them are amusing, some of them are useful, and some are outright pointless and forgettable. But it never really occured to me that there might actually be ways of truly assessing a slang word’s value. There are standards that linguists and philologists use to measure what a new word or phrase provides.
There’s the societal significance: whether the slang captures a specific cultural moment or attitude. There’s the communicative efficiency: whether it conveys a complex idea more succinctly. There’s the emotional resonance: whether it expresses a feeling or attitude more effectively than standard language. Slang words can even be major parts of creating and reinforcing group identities.
Taking a few examples of slang words from my own life, it’s plain to see that not all colloquialisms are created equal.
“Jawn” is an interesting word. Perhaps you’ve heard it, and perhaps you haven’t, but it’s a word with a definition almost as wide as “fuck” and with an origin as hotly contested. Though Philadelphians have long taken pride in coining and popularizing the…
