Is Slang a Word for Linguists?

ALTHOUGH THE PHENOMENON has frequently been discussed, term SLANG has rarely been defined in a way that is useful to linguists.' Annoyance and frustration await anyone who searches professional literature for a definition or even a conception of SLANG that can stand up to scrutiny. Instead one finds impressionism, much of it of a dismaying kind. Holding a distinctly minority view, S. I. Hayakawa (1941, pp. 194-95) has called slang the poetry of everyday and said that it vividly expresses people's feelings about life and about things they encounter in life. We doubt that many professors of literature would accept such a statement, even if they recognized in it an echo of Walt Whitman (1885, p. 573), who, more than half a century earlier, had gone even further in his praise: or indirection, is an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism, and express itself illimitably, which in highest walks produces poets and poems, and doubtless in pre-historic times gave start to, and perfected, whole immense tangle of old mythologies.... Slang, too, is wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize. Since neither writer defines term, Hayakawa and Whitman each must have felt that a notion of SLANG would be clear to his readers. The