Understanding Slang, Register, and Synonymy in Language

Posted on Aug 23, 2024 in Mathematics

Synonym and Register

Synonymy

A relationship of ‘sameness of meaning’ that may hold between two words.

Register

A style or way of speaking adopted by a group. The factors defining a register are:

Degree of formality (“formal”/“polite” vs. “informal”/“intimate”)
Profession or trade (linguists, academics, mountain climbers, miners)
Channel (postcard, CB radio talk, e-mail, internet forums)
Plus anything else which may create a community feeling among people.

Cross-Varietal Synonymy

The use of different terms in different varieties of a language, with the same or substantially the same denotation. Words that have the same meaning as other words used in different contexts. Cross-varietal synonyms share the same denotation but differ in connotation.

However, these sets of terms are not full synonyms: connotations are quite different. How the same word or expression is evaluated may depend on the setting: “piss” might be neutral in a casual context but rude in a polite context. Evaluation of terms might be different for men and women, different age groups, or other subcultural categories.

Slang

Terminology: Origin of the Word Slang

No agreement on definition in the literature and the term is even controversial in itself. Slang is language of a highly colloquial and contemporary type, considered stylistically inferior to standard formal, and even polite informal, speech. Slang may be found among the upper and the lower classes. Originally, ‘used by British criminals to refer to their own special language’.

Definition and Development

Who and Where?

“The street gang and the prison, whence came nearly all the ‘cant’ that filled the early glossaries, still provide a great volume of slang, as do the subcultures of rave, techno and jungle music, crusties and new agers, skaters and snowboarders.”
“Speakers identify with or function within social sub-groups, ranging from surfers, schoolchildren and yuppies, to criminals, drinkers and fornicators.”
“Its users now include ravers, rappers and net-heads along with the miscreants traditionally cited.”
Slang occurs predominantly in teenage talk, and according to some scholars it occurs especially in male talk and tends to emerge in large metropolitan centres before spreading elsewhere.

Purposes and Reasons for the Use of Slang

Main purposes:

To show and reinforce intimacy, the belonging to a group or adherence to a trend / ‘To show that you are one of the gang’
To ‘keep outsiders outside’
To mark social differences (Allen 1998: 878).
To mark the stylistic level of the situation: to emphasize, shock, ease the atmosphere, to express oneself down to earth, show that one masters the situation, and that one is able to play with language and be creative; ‘reversed prestige’, i.e. prestige based on values usually considered “negative”, such as toughness, power.

People use slang for any of at least 15 reasons:

‘Just for the fun of the thing’
As an exercise either in wit and ingenuity or in humour
To be ‘different’, to be novel.
To be picturesque
To be unmistakably arresting, even startling.
To escape from clichés, or to be brief and concise.
To enrich the language
To lend an air of solidity, concreteness, to the abstract; of earthiness to the idealistic, of immediacy and appositeness to the remote.
9a. To lessen the sting of, or … to give additional point to a refusal, a rejection, a recantation.
9b. To reduce, perhaps also to disperse, the solemnity, the pomposity, the excessive seriousness of a conversation.
9c. To soften the tragedy, to lighten or to ‘prettify’ the inevitably of death or madness, or to mask the ugliness or the pity of profound turpitude.
To speak or write down to an inferior, or to amuse a superior public, or merely to be on a colloquial level with either one’s audience or one’s subject matter.
For ease of social intercourse.
To induce either friendliness or intimacy of a deep or a durable kind.
To show that one belongs to a certain school, trade, or profession, artistic or intellectual set, or social class; in brief, to be ‘in the swim’ or to establish contact.
Hence, to show or prove that someone is not ‘in the swim’.
To be secret – not understood by those around one.

Slanguage

Slang covers a large spectrum of colloquial words and expressions. Towards the end of the formality spectrum are words marked in dictionaries as ‘colloquial’ or ‘informal’ and as ‘slang’.

‘Colloquial’ words include:

Words abbreviated for informal effect: bicky (biscuit).
Reduplications: arty-farty
Restricted to informal contexts: barney ‘noisy quarrel’.

‘Slang’ words are likely to be used in more informal contexts:

Informal items that have perhaps not yet reached wide enough acceptance to be labeled ‘colloq’: ace ‘excellent’.
Words that are on the way to becoming ‘taboo’: bog for ‘lavatory’.
Words used in contexts that are very informal, between people who know each other well, or for a particular effect: barmy.

A striking feature of slang is its playfulness. Slang expressions may either stop being slang by intruding into neutral style and become standard usage (e.g. pants) or drop out of use (e.g. square meaning “not cool”). When speakers create names for new concepts, or simply add names to old concepts, metaphor, irony and sound symbolism are important forces behind the new expressions. Much slang demonstrates the poetic inventiveness of ordinary people. Rhyme, quasi-reduplication, alliteration, pleasing rhythms and silly words give rise to euphemistic dysphemisms, or just plain dysphemisms.

Words of Different Nature

Proper Slang

Words and expressions that correspond most closely to the dictionary definitions of slang (creativity and innovation, reflect new trends and tastes).
- Single words: adjectives (cool ‘very good’), nouns (dude ‘guy’, john ‘toilet’, rave ‘party’), simple verbs (frame ‘deceive’)
- Multiwords: phrasal verbs (wind up ‘irritate’, swan around ‘move aimlessly’), prepositional phrases (for yonks ‘a long time’, off one’s rocker ‘mad’).
General slang words, which are not related to a particular group or trend, etc., (booze ‘drink’).
Specific slang words that are (at least in an initial stage) typical of a group or trend: bunk (leave).

Taboo Words

Regular slang words, substitutes for accepted synonyms: piss somebody off (‘irritate’).
Regular slang words, substitutes for accepted synonyms, ex: ‘abusives’ (dickhead).
Regular swearwords ‘expletives’ (bollocks, for fuck’s sake, what the fuck, shit).
Euphemisms (cor blimey).

Vogue Words

Words that already exist in the standard language but which are suddenly used very frequently for a short period of time before going back to normal usage, e.g: massive (‘impressive’).
Old words used with a new meaning: sad (‘contemptible’).
Some of these words are used only by the middle-class teenagers: paranoid.
Other words are used by all, regardless of social background, for instance massive, reckon and rough.

Proxy Words

Words which act for other words ‘quotatives’ replace the verb SAY by BE like
‘Set-markers’, which replace and refer back to a previously mentioned ‘set’ ex: and stuff (like that).
Playful metaphors: metaphors in general.

Pragmatic Markers

Add a different dimension to talk by putting interaction (It’s just, like, they were creepy, like, innit?):

Hedges… (use of like)
‘Empathizers’ (I met Alex you know and …)
‘Monitor’ (that’s the truth though I mean that is a bit silly isn’t it)
Just (I just had to tell you)
Really, which is particularly common as an ‘intensifier’ when teenage girls talk about personal affairs.

Slang, Cant and Jargon

Rhyming Slang

A usually two-word phrase rhymes with and provides the substitute for a normal English word: apples and pears – stairs.
Typically in rhyming slang today the expression has been shortened and the rhyming word gone: brahms from Brahms and and Liszt.
The meanings of these clipped expressions derive from the unstated word which rhymes with the last part of the phrase. So when this word disappears, the sense is then transferred to the first part of the phrase and we have a meaning shift – sometimes quite a spectacular one.
Sometimes arises from the interplay of phonetic similarity and other formal and semantic processes: sugar and honey and bees and honey ‘money’.