Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language Among College Students

241 Pages·1996·10.78 MB·English

by  Connie Eble

stang & sociatitlity
Slang
& sociatility
In-Group Language
among College Stud3ents
C O N N I E E B L E
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapet Hill and London
©1996
The University of
North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the
United States of America
The paper in this book
meets the guidelines for
permanence and durability
of the Committee on
Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of
the Council on Library
Resources.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eble, Connie C.
Slang and sociability: in-group
language among college students /
Connie Eble.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references
(p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2279-5 (cloth: alk. paper).—
ISBN 0-8078-4584-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. College students —United States —
Language (New words, slang, etc.)
2. College students —United States-
Social life and customs. 3. English
language —United States — Slang.
4. Group identity—United States.
5. Americanisms. I. Title.
FE3727.s8E255 1996
427'.973-dc2o 95-47512
CIP
07 06 05 04 03 6 5 4 32
THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.
In memory of
my mother,
Florence Brann Eble,
and
my godmother,
Adele Eble Schwegmann Ledet
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments, ix
Introduction, i
1 Definition, 11
2 Form, 25
3 Meaning, 49
4 Borrowing and Allusion, 74
5 Use, 98
6 Effects, 116
7 Culture, 130
Appendix i. The Top Forty in Slang, 145
Appendix 2. Slang Items with at Least One Synonym, 147
Appendix 3. Some American College Slang circa 1900,150
Select Glossary of Student Slang, 155
Notes, 187
Works Cited, 193
General Index, 203
Index of Words, Expressions, and Affixes, 208
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A project that has been in the works and on the mind for fifteen
years becomes hard to extricate from daily life. I can no longer sort
out in my memory all of the people who encouraged me as this
book gradually took shape from hundreds and soon thousands of
three-by-five cards. I am grateful for all of the responses to con-
ference papers and community lectures, interviews with journal-
ists, and conversations with students, colleagues, and friends that
both helped me organize and interpret the data and confirmed the
human interest in the topic of slang.
My first particular thanks go to my students at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, those "Tar Heel voices" to whom
my book College Slang 101 is dedicated. Several of them are ac-
knowledged in the text or in the notes when I refer to their work.
Elisa Fiorenza and Kenny Levine hold a special place in my af-
fection, for they chose during the hectic second semester of their
senior year to do independent studies with me on slang. My inter-
actions with each of them as they worked diligently and cheerfully
on their projects taught me as much as I taught them.
The first linguist to encourage me to publish on slang was
Charles Ruhl, who helped me impose order on the mounting piles
of index cards when there were no models for studying slang.
Charlie read and critiqued all of my early work on slang, and it
clearly shows the influence of his monosemic view of the lexicon.
My first conference paper on slang was presented at the an-
nual forum of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United
States in 1979. The response was so supportive that I presented a
paper on slang almost every summer after that, all of which are
published in the appropriate volumes of The LACUS Forum and
listed at the end of this book. I am grateful to LACUS for granting
me permission to include portions of some of those papers here.
But I am even more appreciative of the collegial spirit of LACUS
over the years and the personal and professional friendship I have
found there. My special thanks to LACUS colleagues Victor Yngve,
James Copeland, and Marcel Danesi for reading everything I have
written on slang.
Richard Bernstein of the New York Times brought my work on
slang to a general readership, and James Skardon of Spectacle