Influences on Slang: Military and Civilian
It is difficult to appreciate fully what is implied for the future of slang, as for American English as a whole, by the various demographic and technological changes that have reshaped America several times over since 1850 and with relentless force especially after 1900. Moreover, the transformation of the thirteen colonies from an agrarian frontier of chiefly English, West African, and Native American inhabitants into a transcontinental, urban-industrial, electronically bound, multiethnic mass society has wrought unimagined changes on the English vocabulary, as it has on the face of the earth itself. Let us focus on one easily delineated sociological phenomenon that has possibly outstripped all others in its impact on the acquisition and popularization of slang throughout America -- military service.32
Military service -- strengthened by wars and by thirty-five years of conscription -- has shaped with particular effect the contours of modern American slang. Not that it has done so alone. The typical high school or college student may possibly utter more slang terms than the average person in military service. But many of the student expressions fall by the wayside as too adolescent or too esoteric for adult life. For various reasons related especially to perceptions of maturity and competence, recognizably adolescent slang is generally regarded as inappropriate in adult conversation. Unlike students, however, military veterans are not strongly dissuaded from employing in later life the slang, of whatever provenience, that they learned in the service: it is far less specific to age (the majority of service personnel being well out of their teens) and it is likely to be understood by many more people— the multitudes of other veterans and their families -- as opposed to the small circles of high school cliques. And of course no special vocabulary has to be used on anything like a regular basis by individuals to gain a foothold in the language as a whole: the magic of a multiplicity of social networks and interlocking groups will do the job. As is true of most such questions involving popular diction, the studies that could shed real light on the matter remain to be done. Nevertheless, at this stage of our understanding, the nation's armed forces, at least until the end of the draft in 1973, appear to have been the single most important social nexus for the creation, exchange, and eventual dispersion throughout society of American slang in this century.
Consider, first, sheer numbers. The relatively brief U.S. participation in World War I (1917-18) expanded the armed forces to nearly five million men (and about eleven thousand women), a fortyfold increase over prewar levels. In the three adult generations since 1917, on the order of forty million Americans have seen military service, a population roughly five times that of the entire English-speaking world in 1750. More to the point, these veterans -- living and dead -- represent more than a quarter of all adult American men alive during the past seventy-five years. The Veterans Administration, in fact, reports that "approximately 30 percent of all civilian males 18 years old and older were veterans on September 30, 1991."33 Each veteran has communicated to family and friends at least a few words of the slang vocabulary -- civilian and military alike -- that he assimilated in military service. The familiar occurrence in all mass media and in various contexts, nearly half a century after the end of World War II, of terms like snafu, GI, brass, flattop, chew out, boondocks, goof up, sweat it out, flyboy, blitz, foul up, shack up, chow, hit the sack, skivvies, buy it, sad sack, pissed off -- all of which gained most of their civilian currency during that war -- alone suggests the impact of military service on the aggregate of the nation's slang.
Reportage following America's entrance into World War I quickly familiarized the reading public with slang widely current in British military circles, notably Blighty, Huns, fed up, and cooties. Innocuous lists of British army slang appeared in Arthur Guy Empey's best-selling Over the Top (1917) and in the columns of the popular Literary Digest. Even so, although journalism has often encouraged the spread of slang, the chief method of popularization has always been the shifting associational networks among individuals. Military service in this century has compelled the formation -- temporarily but significantly -- of countless new networks of individuals from every region and every class of society. While something similar happened during the Civil War, the enforced commingling of regional backgrounds was substantially less and the communications environment was far less conducive to the dispersion of slang, as of other neologisms, beyond face-to-face interaction. The total number of Civil War, Spanish-American War, and other veterans alive between 1865 and 1916 (less than two and a half million) in proportion to all Americans alive in that period (perhaps a hundred and thirty million) was just one in fifty-two, or about five percent of all male adults, one-fifth of the corresponding twentieth-century figure.34 Insofar as we may gauge "sociocultural influence" of any kind, the modern veterans have had the opportunity to exert many times the influence of the veterans of the Civil War, in terms of raw numbers alone.
And as vocabulary does not develop in a social or psychological vacuum, numbers are not the only issue. The extent and rapidity of social change in wartime is well known. Unquestionably, World War I was responsible for the spread of more American slang of all kinds than was possible in any previous two-year period. Because new words and meanings, like any social trend, can take time to spread, the public often learns about war slang only after hostilities have ceased. To take a purely military example, doughboy, current in the Army since the Mexican War (1846-48), suddenly attracted national attention in 1917-18. So did other now familiar examples, many of them of prewar origin but previously little known outside the armed forces: leatherneck, gob, limey, Heinie, frog, birdman, chow, bump off, ammo, Big Bertha, foxhole, dogtag, brass hat, and buck private.
World War II surpassed World War I in word production as well as in violence. By V-J Day American forces at home and abroad were double their 1918 levels, and the spread of slang had increased exponentially. To the World War II examples previously given, we might add gyrene 'a marine', confined before 1942 to the Navy and Marine Corps, but provably dating back, at least at Annapolis, to the 1890's. Sweat it out, an older regional phrase in the sense 'to endure with anxiety', first surged into national vogue via the World War II military for no very obvious reason: Mark Twain had used the current sense in Tom Sawyer, and it had appeared in print as early as 1865, with only rare printed appearances before 1944.
The Korean War contributed relatively little slang to the civilian vocabulary aside from bug out, whirlybird, chopper, and skosh 'a little bit', adopted from Japanese sukoshi But the long and intensively reported Vietnam War popularized much that was, again, both old and new: grunt, zap, gook, hootch, Charlie, waste 'to kill', Nam, the World, Hanoi Hilton. The insulting gook is by far the oldest of these, in print as long ago as 1920 but confined largely to the armed forces for nearly fifty years.
Other components of slang use in the armed forces go deeper than mere numbers or the degree of simple geographical dislocation in service life. All the well-known social and psychological factors mentioned earlier that go into the creation and use of slang are present in military society to an extraordinary degree. Armed forces personnel, especially in this century, are socialized into a heightened if not always welcome sense of belonging to a large, diverse loose-knit but easily definable group (the infantry, enlisted men, the crew of a specific naval vessel, for example), especially as opposed to various other groups (nonaviators, nonparatroopers, nonmarines, commissioned officers, the enemy, all civilians). Plunged into the "total institution" of basic training, generally far from home; thrown into enforced close contact with numerous strangers; abused and ridiculed in ingenious, memorable terms by drill instructors; facing an uncertain and presumably violent future; roundly depersonalized and treated explicitly as an expendable instrument of command policy; and discomfited by the entire process, the trainee often begins to affect a casehardened (or, nowadays, hard-core) persona, chiefly among his comrades, but occasionally elsewhere as well. The point of this behavior is largely to "prove" through language, partly to others and partly to himself, that he is now free of mainstream (that is, civilian) social restraints. Much of this aggressive and amply documented form of self-presentation, not strictly confined to the military, turns conspicuously upon a cynical, macho style of speech in which slang plays a prominent role.35
From a different angle the discontents of service life have always led soldiers and sailors to grumble, another habit that encourages slang use. But our point here is simply that, for the past seventy-five years, fighting wars or preparing to do so has directly and indirectly encouraged more Americans to use more slang than has any other readily identifiable activity.
Nevertheless, though it may not spread far and wide quite as quickly, most slang originates outside of the military, among civilians following civilian pursuits. In addition to student slang (not very noticeable until the roaring twenties), we should mention some other interesting and important sources.
The extensive -- and often caricatured -- seafaring slang of the nineteenth century faded with the disappearance of commercial deep-water sail during the 1920's; few modern expressions have a nautical rather than a specifically naval origin.
The slang of the cowboy -- whose numbers probably did not exceed twenty-five thousand between 1865 and 1890, the brief period of the great cattle drives -- began reaching an eager general audience only after the turn of the century: the first cowboy novel worthy of the name was Owen Wister's lexically conservative The Virginian of 1902. So-called cowboy slang was greatly augmented in the twenties and thirties by Zane Grey and other fiction writers. Ernest Haycox, for example, popularized the now standard gunslinger among Western writers and readers. (We may doubt the term's credentials as a genuine product of the Old West: it did not see print until 1928.) Cowpuncher (hence later cow-punch and cowpoke) comes from the 1870's, bronco-buster, bronc-fighter, and bronc-stomper from a little later. If, as has been suggested, dogey 'a runted or motherless calf' is of West African origin—a similar word is used in Jamaica for short-legged fowl -- it must go back to Texas in the slave era before the trail drives; of this, however, we have no direct evidence, and the origin of dogey remains uncertain.
The flamboyant style of sports reporting, replete with slang neologisms, has its ultimate roots in journalistic accounts by Pierce Egan and others of British prizefighting in the early nineteenth century; this style experienced an American renaissance, originally in baseball, before 1910. To this period we owe bingle 'a base hit', southpaw (simply "the left hand" in earlier use), hurler, bush league, and bean ball.
The Jazz Age got under way in 1917 with the phonographic release of "Livery Stable Blues" and "The Darktown Strutters' Ball," but it introduced little slang directly related to the music, a music whose unique amalgamation of African, European, and Spanish-American traits soon swept the world. The spectacular lexical exception was the new and respectable meaning of the formerly obscene word jazz, which, received by the majority of Americans as merely a new word to designate the music, was quickly destined to become Standard English. (The curious may ponder the likelihood that the four-letter word jazz, originally meaning 'to copulate with', may well have sprung from the nineteenth-century jasm or jism 'semen; vitality', itself of unknown origin.36) It was not until the swing era of the thirties and forties that the dictionary was imprinted with jam session, (solid) sender, alligator, jive, killer-diller, hepcat, jitterbug, and square. As is true of most subcultural vocabularies, most of these words had been in use among insiders before becoming national fads; others, often of questionable authenticity, were publicized by press agents and journalists. The jazz artist Louis Armstrong himself was credited by colleagues with introducing new senses of dig and cat into jazz speech, though precisely from where is not clear: they do not appear in earlier Black English and thus are unlikely to have developed from African words. (Nor does etymology support an African origin for hep/hip, jitterbug, or O.K: early attestation in slavery times is lacking for each of these terms, as is a likely source from an influential parent language. Improbable as it may seem, the documentary evidence unearthed long ago by Allen Walker Read that O.K. originally abbreviated the facetious oll korrect is rock solid. Other researchers have had thirty years to controvert Read's findings but have not cogently done so.37, 38 )
Because relatively few black Americans (fewer than five percent) lived in crowded Northern cities by 1910, Black English had a late start as a salient influence on national slang. Little slang of any kind appears in the many volumes of testimony collected from elderly former slaves by WPA writers in the 1930's.39 Not until the thirties, during the great northward migration of millions of black Southerners, can one observe a contribution of Black English and jazz slang to general slang, mainly through the popularity of swing bands like Cab Calloway's in major cities and the widespread dissemination of their recordings. But Black English became a major influence on slang only after the desegregation of the armed forces (1948-52), continued migration, and the popularization of black slang through all mass media, beginning at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960's and continuing to the present day. We should point out that Black English words are not necessarily of African origin; many are rooted in Southern regionalisms, are semantic shifts of Standard English words, or are of unknown origin. Doubtless of African-American origin are such terms as badmouth, beat one's chops, cakewalk 'an easy task', chump change, dicty, dig 'to see, enjoy, understand, etc.', dis, funky, fox 'an attractive woman', gig a 'job', gutbucket 'a style of jazz', jive, juke joint, main man, nitty-gritty, ofay, salty 'angry', soul brother (or sister), wig out, and bad and cool in senses with connotations of stylishness and quality. A few of these are now Standard American English, and all are abundantly documented in recent writing.
Robbins Burling and others have called attention to a seeming paradox in the widespread adoption of black slang by white speakers who would "rarely imitate black grammar or black pronunciation except in derision."40 We believe this paradox can be explained as follows. Those bigoted whites who would imitate Black English only in derision are unlikely, except for the purpose of ridicule, to knowingly adopt Black English slang at all. Other whites take to black slang for various reasons. First, its novelty appeals to them, regardless of its ethnic origin; that is, they adopt it as they would any other slang. Second, some speakers, especially younger ones, may not recognize it as black slang in particular. Third, some may enjoy, possibly subconsciously, the vicarious identifications with big-city street life (compare the attraction of cant for Thomas Shadwell's seventeenth-century youth in Cant to the Present Day, p. xxiii). And fourth, they may predictably absorb new expressions from people they like, regardless of color, whether those people are friends, associates, or distant celebrities. For similar reasons blacks often adopt the slang of whites. Words, after all, are words, and as such have no ethnicity of their own.
The film industry, too, and show business in general, grew to impressive slang-disseminating proportions in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Much of that new slang vocabulary was spread at the time by way of the Broadway-based trade paper Variety, whose editors cultivated a reputation for slang and telegraphically occult headlines. ("Sticks Nix Hick Pix" [July 17, 1935, p.1] was the prime example, often palely imitated, as by Newsweek in 1993, "Hip Lips Dis Yucky Flicks" [January 18, p. 65], but surpassed in New York's Cue magazine, which entitled an article on Variety "Crix Nix Hix Pix" [August 1, 1936, p. 6].) Consider turkey, flack, lay an egg (or a bomb), nabe, disc jockey -- all apparently products of the Variety staff.
Media interest has, of course, diffused underworld and prison terms ever since the days of Robert Copland in the early sixteenth century; popular interest in graphic accounts of criminality soared after the onset of Prohibition in 1920. The next dozen or so years led to the debut of numerous underworld terms in the general slang lexicon, notably grifter, flatfoot, fence, gun moll, gunsel, torpedo, case (the joint), and big shot.
The half century since the end of World War II also saw contributions from the Beat and hippie movements, urban homosexuals, the drug subculture, citizens-band operators, and -- heirs apparent to the military as the most important source of slang -- students in the nation's myriad secondary schools and colleges. Although face-to-face interaction, especially in cities, has absolutely encouraged the diffusion of slang from these groups, the critical element for rapid rather than gradual dissemination has undoubtedly been media representations of such groups in both fictional and nonfictional form.
Some recent writers have asserted that groups notable for slang use -- soldiers, students, convicts, and ethnic minorities -- use slang largely because they lack political power. Such assertions are mainly circular and based on simple impressionism and shifting definitions of slang. We should suspend judgment on such claims. It has also been observed traditionally -- though, again, impressionistically -that women use less slang than men. As long ago as 1868 the middleclass monthly The Ladies' Repository, aimed at a female audience, congratulated its readers that "if it were not for our women there would be danger of having our English smothered in slang. They seldom use it -- a well-bred woman never uses it."41 A century later Stuart Flexner, in his introduction to the Dictionary of American Slang, stated the proposition strongly:
Most American slang is created and used by males. Many types of slang words -- including the taboo and strongly derogatory ones, those referring to sex, women, work, money, whiskey, politics, transportation, sports, and the like -- refer primarily to male endeavor and interest. The majority of entries in this dictionary could be labeled "primarily masculine use."42 Though inconclusive in itself, the citational evidence in this dictionary, as well as the editor's own admittedly limited impressions, supports the hypothesis that American men in general have traditionally known and used a more extensive slang repertory than have women of the same socioeconomic class, especially upper- and middle-class women. (Slang as used here, does not mean 'general informal or nonstandard language'. Common experience suggests that the speech of both sexes is comparably informal.) If this hypothesis proves true, Flexner's explanation could be a valid one: until the recent past, relatively few women were involved with exceptionally slang-productive activities and subcultures. Nor has the slang persona of flippancy, hyperbole, cynicism, and tough talk held much appeal for the class of suburban women that advertisers once stereotyped as "America's moms." Even so, countless anecdotal reports and one or two competent studies compel the belief that the situation has slowly been changing, particularly in the lessening of verbal taboos. The use of profanity and a few sexual and scatological terms once largely confined (we think) to masculine gatherings, while detectable after World War I in the familiar middle-class speech of both sexes, has burgeoned since World War II. Among themselves and among others, college women -- no longer so middle-class as in previous generations -- almost certainly have begun to affect a more "masculine" scatological speech style since Flexner wrote in 1960. For empirical evidence see our discussion of Cameron's study below.43 Of course, an increased prominence of "dirty words" in anybody's vocabulary does not entail an increased familiarity with a larger slang lexicon. The interesting questions of "women and slang," "men and slang," "minorities and slang," "power and slang," etc., are complicated ones, and current "answers" rest mainly on unanalyzed assumptions. Careful investigation is required from more than one discipline.