Language Has Always Evolved from the Bottom Up
Every generation produces slang that its elders dismiss as lazy, degrading, or temporary. And yet, the English language that we consider formal and correct today is largely built from the slang, street talk, and informal innovations of the past. Understanding this process reveals something fundamental: language is not handed down from authority — it rises up from use.
What Is Slang, Exactly?
Slang is informal vocabulary that typically originates within a specific social group — youth culture, a profession, a regional community, an online subculture — and is characterised by novelty, expressiveness, and in-group identity. Its defining feature is that it exists outside the accepted standard of the moment.
But "outside the accepted standard" is a moving target. Words that are slang today may be standard in twenty years. The process by which this happens is called lexical legitimisation.
The Journey from Slang to Standard
The path a word takes from informal to formal use generally follows these stages:
- Origin: A word emerges within a subculture or community — often creative, irreverent, or expressive of something no existing word captures well.
- Spread: The word moves beyond its original community, picked up by neighbouring social groups, media, or popular culture.
- Normalisation: Widespread use removes the novelty. The word becomes unremarkable. People no longer feel they are "using slang."
- Dictionary Entry: Lexicographers — who describe language rather than prescribe it — add the word to dictionaries once sufficient evidence of widespread, sustained use exists.
- Standard Acceptance: The word loses any informal or colloquial label and is considered plain English.
Words That Made the Journey
Consider these now-standard words, all of which were once considered slang or non-standard:
- Banter — once considered low and informal, now fully standard.
- Mob — a shortening of the Latin phrase mobile vulgus (the fickle crowd); condemned as vulgar slang in the 17th century.
- Okay / OK — possibly the most successful piece of slang ever, originating in 19th-century American playful misspelling, now used globally.
- Nerd — emerged as slang in the 1950s, now appears in formal writing without comment.
- Selfie — first recorded online in the early 2000s, added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013.
The Role of African American Vernacular English (AAVE)
A significant portion of the slang that filters into mainstream English originates in African American Vernacular English. Words and phrases like cool, hip, woke, slay, lit, and many others first circulated in Black communities before being adopted broadly by popular culture.
This pattern raises important questions about credit, cultural ownership, and the politics of language — a reminder that the story of how words travel is always also a story about people and power.
What Makes Slang Stick?
Not all slang survives. Most of it fades within a generation. The words that endure tend to:
- Fill a genuine gap in the language — expressing something no existing word captures as neatly.
- Be phonetically satisfying — short, punchy, easy to say.
- Achieve broad cultural reach — through music, television, social media, or literature.
- Retain meaning under pressure — remaining useful even as they spread beyond their original context.
Language Is a Living Thing
The boundary between "proper" English and slang has always been permeable. Prescriptivists who insist on freezing language in its current form are, in a sense, defending slang that happened to win. Every generation writes the rules — and the next generation changes them.