Symphony in Slang

Via Moviegoods

I came across this funny short video called 'Symphony in Slang' a little while ago when I was browsing the Internet as usual. It's a Tex Avery cartoon from 1951 about a young man who is about to enter the gateway to Heaven but not before he leaves a record of his life to St Peter. As the title of the video reveals, the man's narrative is entirely filled with contemporary slang words and expressions. Flabbergasted by the fellow's "odd manners of speech", St Peter asks Noah Webster, the famous American lexicographer, to interpret the man's story, but without success. What follows is a series of scenes in which we see Webster's imagined literal understandings of the phrases.

How many slang expressions can you identify in the video, and do you know what they mean? Leave your comments below!

On idioms: Before you can say Jack Robinson

Via ingoodfaith

'Yo ho, my boys!' said Fezziwig. 'No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's have the shutters up,' cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, 'before a man can say Jack Robinson!' (Charles Dickens,  A Christmas Carol, 1843)

Each language has certain words and phrases which cannot be directly translated into another language, because these terms or expressions have a figurative rather than a literal meaning. I'm talking about idioms or idiomatic expressions. I remember a little while ago that I was looking for a phrase in English to tell someone that she should make the most of her time back home, because she'll be back in Sheffield in no-time. In Dutch (my native language), I would say:

"Geniet ervan, want voor je het weet ben je weer terug in Sheffield"

which in English would literally translate as:

 "Enjoy, before you know it, you'll be back in Sheffield"

My intuition told me that 'before you know it' sounded somewhat odd in English (though I'm sure English speakers will get the gist), so I decided to look up the English idiom that would describe "in a very short time". I can't remember how I found it, but Google managed to provide me the expression "Before you can say Jack Robinson" to describe the exact thing that I wanted to say.

That's also how I came across The Phrase Finder, a wonderful resource that lists all the phrases and idioms in English. The great thing about this resource is that it gives you some information about the origin (etymology) of the word and meaning, although we'll never be able to check whether that information is correct or not. What made this expression all the more interesting is that it was recorded in one of the 18th century dictionaries that I study:

JACK ROBINSON, before one could say Jack Robinson, a saying to express a very short time, originating from a very volatile gentleman of that appellation, who would call on his neighbours, and be gone before his name could be announced (Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785)

As with any slang dictionary, we don't get any information about the origin of the phrase. So who is this Jack Robinson person exactly? According to the Phrase Finder, there was a real Sir John Robinson who was the Tower of London Constable in the sixteenth century and had a notorious reputation for chopping many people's heads off. However, the Phrase Finder does call the link between this person and the coinage of this expression into question. Perhaps it's just another urban legend, and will remain so forever.

So just a question for my native English speaking friends or readers: Is this expression still commonly used today? Do you use this expression yourself?

Slang in the Spotlight: Flash

In "Slang in the Spotlight", I will highlight a historical slang (or cant) term once in a while, because these are the words that most people will be unfamiliar with. The first word is "flash" and the meaning and quotes are taken from J.C. Hotten's Dictionary of Modern Cant, Slang and Vulgar Language (1859), and The Old Bailey Proceedings Online respectively. 

FLASH. 
Showy and knowing; a word with various meanings. A person is said to be dressed flash, when his garb is showy and after a fashion, but without taste. A person is said to be flash when he apes the appearance or manners of his betters, or when he is trying to be superior to his friends and relations. Flash also means "fast", roguish, and sometimes infers counterfeit or deceptive, and this perhaps is its general signification. "Flash, my young friend, or slang, as others call it, is the classical language of the Holy Land; in other words, St. Giles' Greek" -- Tom and Jerry, by Moncreiff. Vulgar language was first term Flash in the year 1718, by Hitchin, author of "The Regulator of Thieves, &c., with account of flash words". (Hotten 1859: 39)

• I swear they were Bank of England notes, notes, not hair dressers' flash notes; I never saw a flash note they were exactly as Bank notes. (Trial Francis Hall, 19 February 1829)
• When I went in [the room] I heard the word, ding it, come from the yard. Q. Was there any way for any persons in the yard seeing you? - No, I only knew it to be a flash word, meaning, to put it on one side (Trial of Druce and Bowling, 18 February 1795) 

Term can also be used as a verb for "showing something":

• He [Berry] changed a guinea, and gave me five shillings, and bid me not to be extravagant; he gave me that, as he said, to flash to the boys, to shew it to them, and say, I made that last night; I was to pull it out all at once. (Trial of M'Daniel, Berry, Egan, 1 March 1755)

Copper

Here's the trailer of Copper, an upcoming BBC tv-series that follows the life of police detective Kevin Concoran in 19th-century New York and that reminds me of Gangs of New York (which I still have to watch!). I'm quite excited about this show because the characters might be speaking some cant terms (cant is another word for the gangster language in earlier times). If you want a snippet of what these cant terms sounded like, click here for an article that discusses some of these terms (I will probably have another blogpost about some of these terms in more detail, since that's the core of my PhD research).


   

Urban Dictionary

Even though I spend most of my time looking at slang words in the past, I get carried away very easily by readings about language-related stuff in general (I can't help being a linguist and a language lover). The other day, I found myself checking Urban Dictionary when I was searching for some metalinguistic comments on present-day slang. I typed in 'slang' as a keyword search as I was curious about how Urban Dictionary users would define slang. These are the top 3 results, which were ranked according to most 'thumbs up':

1. The only reason Urbandictionary.com exists.

2. The ever-evolving bastardization of the written and spoken language as a result of social and cultural idolization of uneducated, unitelligable celebrities.

3. Slang is the continual and ever-changing use and definition of words in informal conversation, often using references as a means of comparison or showing likeness. Some modern slang has endured over the decades since its inception (i.e. cool) and some will only last a few years before being rendered obsolete or outdated (i.e. bling bling). Slang can be born from any number of situations or ideas (the word slang itself has come to represent selling, especially of illegal drugs), and can be blunt or riddled with metaphor, and often quite profound.

I was quite amused by the first comment. Thinking more deeply about it, Urban Dictionary is without doubt one of the most interesting and valuable resources on 21st-century slang. The most frustrating thing for historical linguists is that they do not have direct access to the spoken language of the past. We can only rely on what's been recorded in written documents, but we are always faced with the question of authencity: How truthful is the written word to the spoken discourse? In general, written and oral language don't seem to resemble each other at all. For example, spoken discourse is fragmented, whereas written discourse is careful planned. But to go back to the value of Urban Dictionary as a resource, what makes this online dictionary unique is that, as they declare on their homepage: It's is the dictionary you wrote (you being the language user). The emphasis is not mine. Like Wikipedia, it's the user who writes and decides the content, which leads to wonderful and insightful comments such as (2) and (3). Also, all word entries are dated and example sentences in which the term is used are provided. This kind of contextual information is hardly found in eighteenth-century slang dictionaries. And as long as the WWW remains to exist, chances are little that this information will disappear very easily. Future linguists should be very pleased.