“Slang” is nonstandard language. In some circles slang is considered worse than just nonstandard; the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “A species of cannon; a serpentine or culverin.” Oops, no, that’s what “slang” meant in the 1500s. I should have used this: “A long narrow strip of land.” Oh, drat; not that one either. That’s what “slang” meant in the 1600s. I’ll try again. “Slang: A watch-chain; a chain of any kind.” Well this is embarrassing; that’s the definition of “slang” from the 1800s.
Trying one more time. “Slang: language of a low and vulgar type” used by “persons of a low or disreputable character.” There, that’s what I was looking for. My point is, or at least was, that the OED seems to be going a bit over the top here, casting such strong aspersions on slang. After all, in many ways “slang” is nothing more than a category applied to words for a while before they’re widely enough adopted to be listed in dictionaries.
English adopts words that originate in lots of different ways, including words that are coined and used by groups that use a particular vocabulary to reinforce — and test — whether you’re a real member of the group. For example, before a lot of their slang was published in novels and depicted in movies, people who identified with the criminal underworld could talk amongst themselves about boosting and chiseling the marks and crumbs out of their dough and then raise more scratch by moving the swag.
Even if some slang isn’t popularized because of a genre of fiction, many slang words gradually get adopted and normalized. Eventually nobody remembers that they used to be slang. “Spurious”, which is a perfectly respectable word (it means false or mistaken) and “strenuous” (strong or laborious) were once slang “used by low or disreputable persons” — but that was several centuries ago.
Occasionally an accepted word falls out of favor and starts to be considered slang. “Ain’t,” for example, is generally considered improper nowadays, but for most of its history — and it’s quite a long history — there was nothing wrong with using “ain’t.” It appeared in 1875: “I ain’t thinking of her marrying,” 1907: “If ‘ain’t I?’ is objected to, surely ‘aren’t I?’ is very much worse,” and for that matter, 1684: “Ain’t it all one if I tell you afterwards?”
As for “slang” itself — the word, that is — its origin is a bit of a mystery. It seems to have appeared in the 1700s, and while there’s a theory that it came from a Norwegian prefix “sleng-“ that’s sometimes used for offensive language, that seems to be unlikely. There’s another theory that it’s formed from “language” and something beginning with “s”, thus creating “SLANGuage,” but (1) nobody can figure out where the “s” might have come from, and (2) this is probably just a story made up after the fact. So for now, we just ain’t sure where “slang” came from.
