From a linguistic point of view, there are many problems and inefficiencies in the English. Slang generally worsens the situation. I can’t imagine Snoop’s izzle-speak being much of an improvement. 733t-5p33k is pretty much an abomination.
My question is whether there has ever been an improvement as a result of slang. Is it that far-fetched to believe that someone could come up with a solution to a linguistic problem and sneak it in as a slang fix (acting as something of a retrovirus to cure the ills of the English language)?
In order for this question to be answerable, we’d need an ironclad definition of what slang is. You’ll never find one. Yesterday’s slang is today’s standard speech, after all. And anyway, think how impoverished expression would be on this very message board if slang – as you might define it – were discouraged.
Depends on what you mean by “improve,” of course. One man’s improvement is another man’s Decline and Fall of Western Civilization.
But if I had to guess, I would offer the contraction as a general improvement to the language’s use. Now I’m not sure contractions would have ever counted as slang, but they’ve certainly been frowned upon (and still are, by some professors). In general, the further back one goes, the less contractions one sees in formal written English.
As an aside, if you ever see the movie The Village, pay close attention to the dialogue. You’ll notice almost no contractions whatsoever, which was clearly done on purpose.
You are in the midst of one such grassroots revolution: ending sentences with a preposition. Two centuries of grammarians have railed against it but even they have given up on enforcing it.
Don’t worry; “izzle” is dead and leet is thoroughly ghettoized since it cannot be spoken.
Loopus, I love “okay” for that reason and wonder how people functioned without it. It fills a gap in most languages nobody seems to have known was there until it was filled and now “okay” is indispensible.
Not sure if this is snarky or not, but the assertion isn’t true. Fuck is a word of Germanic origin drawn from the sense of “to breed.”
I think it’d be a tall order constructing an argumnent that slang, however defined, has ever hurt language. English is a highly adapted and adaptable language with more vocabulary than any other, allowing a remarkable range of expression. A lot of those words started in informal contexts. I think it’s been great for everyone involved.
I don’t think it did. “Fuck” is a really old, Anglo-Saxon word, with a bunch of cognates in other Germanic languages, which makes it seem like it was always standard English and not slang or jargon.
As someone mentioned above, “improve” is a word that is completely subjective. You could make a reasonable argument that slang increases the diversity and color of a language.
I have two opinions to offer: this is not a question to which there is a factual answer, and slang often enriches, and therefore improves, the English language.
Slang can be defined as any change in a language. So if a language is ever to improve (whatever the heck that means), it must be via slang that it does so.
Prepositions are fine wherever they want to be, as long as it’s clear what their respective objects are. On the other hand, parallel structure (from the same source) is an absolute.
So what you are saying is that we won the revolution? Or that it we finally quashed a civil war, begun by Dryden (whose translations I like but whose poetry, plays, and grammatical rules, not so much) and fought by prissy schoolmarms for 300 years?
