A research portal for scholars, the press and the public
The Slang and New Language Archive was created in 1994 while I was Director of the Language Centre at King’s College London. The archive, consisting of a small library of books and periodicals and a number of databases and sub-directories, was designed as a repository for the collection, storage and dissemination of new language, in particular examples of nonstandard varieties of English such as slang, jargon and buzzwords. The archive was later expanded to take in examples of media language, political language, linguistic curiosities and etymologies. It remains a resource, unique in the UK, assisting researchers, students, teachers and journalists, as well as non-specialists, in accessing information about aspects of contemporary language that are under-represented in traditional dictionaries and reference works.
This link will take you to the Archive webpage at King’s College, where there are further links to relevant articles and published sources…
Glossaries from the archive may be accessed on this site by entering keywords, such as slang, jargon, MLE (Multiethnic London English), familect (highly colloquial language used in the home), coronaspeak (language related to the COVID-19 pandemic) and weaponised words (the contentious language of Brexit and populism) and slurs (racist and misogynist terms) in the search box. Once you have accessed a post of interest, check the tags and categories at the foot of the page for other articles or glossaries on the same topic.
Two of the larger archive datafiles are hosted on Aston University’s Institute of Forensic Linguistics Databank site. These are a glossary of current youth slang…
Please note that the King’s archive focuses principally on contemporary language, that is terms used from the twentieth century to the present day. If you are interested in historical slang, I strongly recommend the monumental work by my associate, the British lexicographer Jonathon Green. His dictionary, now generously freely available online, lists current and historical slang terms with timelines and citations illustrating their usage and development…
For more information, for queries, or to donate examples of language, contact me via this website or via the King’s College webpage. I’m on Twitter as @tonythorne007 too.
GANG CULTURE, RAP MUSIC, STREET SLANG AND POLICING
I have written elsewhere on this site about my own unusual forays into forensic linguistics, whereby I have helped legal defence teams, police forces and other interested parties in decoding, interpreting and assessing the slang used by gang members, an authentic urban language variety which is shared with rap music genres, particularly Drill music.
The citing of rap lyrics in the context of criminal trials and attempts to ban Drill lyrics is very controversial and some academic linguists, musicologists and criminologists argue that they should never in any circumstances be admitted in evidence – a stance I sympathise with, but feel is mistaken.*
One London Met Police officer with whom I have worked has written about his own recent activities at the intersection of music, youth culture and youth violence. The article offers a very rare professional insider’s perspective on the issues in contention, and with Michael Railton‘s permission I have linked to it here…
Just over a year since I defended Meghan Markle‘s speaking style*, the Daily Mail returned to the subject with the latest interview given in his new US home by Prince Harry, in which, along with dropping several ‘truth bombs,’ he was perceived to be modifying his natural accent to sound more American. I once again pointed out that what linguists call ‘accommodation’** or ‘convergence’, the phenomenon whereby participants in a conversation alter their pronunciation and intonation to sound more like their interlocutors, is something quite natural and unsurprising. I have found my own natural rhythms and tones subtly changing when spending time with speakers of Australian or North American English, and the posh-sounding Brit who morphs into a cockney or northerner when the plumber or builder visits is a stock target of mockery on social media. In the case of the royal family, wits remarked long ago that Prince Charles and Princess Diana‘s incompatibility could have been predicted by listening to their differing accents – the former’s clipped, tense, military-sounding while his bride attempted a more muted, classless diction with glottal stops and ‘Estuary English’ vowels.
The Mail’s article, in which they mercifully didn’t distort what I told them (though ‘new wave’ should read New Age), is here…
The themes of the year so far can perhaps be summarised by my hasty posts in passing, on Twitter and elsewhere, in which I considered the keywords trending in the UK’s political and media discourse during the last days of January and the first days of February…
Scurrilous
Rather late to the party – sorry, ‘gathering’ – today’s word is ‘scurrilous.’ Defined by Dr Samuel Johnson as ‘using such language as only the licence of a buffoon could warrant.’ In her resignation letter yesterday Downing Street Policy Chief Munira Mirza accused Boris Johnson of ‘scurrilous’ behaviour when he falsely linked Keir Starmer to the failure to bring paedophile Jimmy Savile to justice. The word first appeared in English in the early 1500s in the form ‘scurrile’, coarsely joking, from the Latin ‘scurrilis’, buffoonlike, itself from the noun ‘scurra’ denoting a fashionable loafer, idler, buffoon, said to be a loan word from Etruscan.
Glee
On 2/2/22, as #BorisJohnson and #jimmysavile jointly trended for the second day, the word ‘glee’ was ascribed to both. It denotes barely repressed mirth/hardly concealed febrile joy and I think describes the desperate glint of triumph in the eyes of the abuser who once again goes unpunished. ‘Glee’ was Old English ‘gliu’, ‘gliw’, ‘gleow’ – entertainment, jest, play, also music and mockery – probably from Proto-Germanic ‘*gleujam’ but its only close relation was the rare Old Norse word ‘gly’ joy. All these are related to Old Germanic ‘gl-‘ words with senses of shining, smooth, radiant, joyful and Celtic cognates such as welsh ‘gloywa’, shining. Dictionary definitions of ‘glee’ note another nuance or connotation (more technically ‘semantic component’) which is often present: ‘exultation deriving from one’s own good fortune or another’s misfortune.’
Airfix nostalgia
As Airfix promoted their 2022 calendar (cover picture above), I was asked again to explain the notion of ‘Airfix nostalgia’, an expression which mocks the delusion whereby nativists, patriots and bigots, most of them under the age of 50, like to imagine that they were personally involved in WWII or the British Imperial project. The reference is to the Airfix plastic modelling kits of fighter planes and warships bought by parents and children in the 50s and assembled at home.
Fib
In among rancorous ongoing denunciations of lying by those in public office (see elsewhere on this site and in this list by Peter Oborne*) came a passing invocation of – or attempt at disculpation by reference to – the lesser offence of ‘fibbing’. A fib is a ‘trifling lie’ or ‘white lie’, so I’m not sure it’s quite the right term in the current context, but it’s from the 1580s, the verb from 100 years later. Its exact origin and first use are uncertain, but it probably began as a jocular version of ‘fable’, perhaps reduplicated as ‘fibble-fable’ and then abbreviated to its modern form.
Rhubarb
When accused of being complicit in the authorising of an airlift of dogs from Afghanistan, PM Boris Johnson described the allegation as ‘total rhubarb’. The colloquial borrowing of the word to mean incomprehensible chatter or nonsense may have its origin in theatrical circles (as noted by Mark Peters in 2015**): it is again a telling choice of words: dated, euphemistic (like ‘mince’ as a euphemism for sh**t which seems similarly to be part of Tory groupspeak), obscure in the sense of being class/age-sensitive, hence condescending.
Endemicity
A new and tendentious, contentious example of #coronaspeak was added to my glossaries on this site in January 2022. The seemingly neutral, technical term was in fact employed in attempts to convince the public that the pandemic was subsiding and the coronavirus morphing into a less lethal presence in the community. Epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani noted perceptively that ‘Endemicity’ is the rebranding of ‘herd immunity’ by the same people who were repeatedly wrong about how close we’ve been to achieving herd immunity. They’re now moving to claiming we’ve reached endemicity, regardless of what the term actually means – just like they did before.’
Lawfare/lethal aid
As the promoter of Brexit Arron Banks sued investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and the US sent the first aid packages to Ukraine I added two key terms to the #weaponisedwords glossary on this site: #Lawfare, referring to vexatious litigation by a nation or individual, and ‘lethal aid’, a euphemism or (as lexicographer Jeremy Butterfield pointed out to me) a dysphemism for military assistance.
Languishing
In mid-January articles examined the effects of isolation and burnout after nearly two years of restrictions and confinement using a new characterisation of the condition***: ‘languish,’ from the 14th century, meaning to be feeble, listless, moribund or grieving, pining, is from Old French ‘languir,’ from Vulgar Latin ‘languire’ to be weak, faint, idle, from proto-IndoEuropean *'(s)leg’ the ancestor of ‘slack’, ‘lag’ and ‘lax’. ‘Anguish’ is unrelated.
Depravity
Despite the blizzard of slurs and denigrations circulating on social media and in the mainstream press since 2019, some words have been conspicuous by their absence. One such began trending in the UK national conversation, and then only briefly, in mid-January. ‘Depravity’ in the sense of immorality, degeneracy was first recorded in English in 1641, not directly formed from the earlier verb ‘deprave’ (Old French ‘depraver’, pervert, accuse, from Latin ‘depravare’ distort, disfigure) but a version of the noun ‘pravity’ from Latin ‘pravitas’, crookedness, deformity, from ‘pravus’, crooked.
Guile
On January 7 my word of the day was ‘guile’ (first ascribed to the leader of HM Opposition, and then energetically disputed on social media: ‘…it took guile to convince so many on Labour’s left that he was the natural successor to Jeremy Corbyn’ –The Times) The noun, meaning cunning, artful ability to deceive and/or duplicity, was first recorded in the 12th century. It is from Old French ‘guile’ from Frankish ‘wigila’, ruse, from Proto-Germanic ‘*wihl’, ancestor of English wile(s), from Proto-IndoEuropean ‘*weik’, consecrated, holy.
“Postmodernity is modernity without the hopes and dreams which made modernity bearable. it is a hydra-headed, decentred condition in which we get dragged along from pillow [sic] to post across a succession of reflected surfaces, drawn by the call of the wild signifier.” – Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, 1988
Among the toxic terms listed in the glossary of weaponised words, elsewhere on this site*, is a term that has seemed contentious and which has been imperfectly understood since its first appearance in the late Sixties. I included the same word – Postmodernism – in my 1993 book Fads, Fashions and Cults, provocatively subtitled ‘The definitive guide to post(modern) culture.’ When my book, which was aimed at a popular, not a scholarly readership, was launched in Slovenia and featured on national television the Slovene philosopher and critical theorist Mladen Dolar dismissed it as atheoretical and trivial, two other resonant terms which I was not sure whether to resent or to celebrate at the time. An extract from the offending title follows…
Elsewhere on this site I have tried to follow the trajectory of woke**, another, rather different toxic buzzword now favoured by the same side, the opponents of BLM, eco-activism, ‘leftist’ attitudes, in the so-called culture wars that rage on despite the pandemic. In a perceptive review in the New Statesman this week William Davies sets out postmodernism’s trajectory, its recent reimaginings and reiterations by very different interest groups. His article, with his kind permission, is here…
To end with for now, another extract from my antique 1993 guide. I am still pondering the present and possible future of the second p-word, along with other characterisations of our era such as late-modern, techno-modern, post-industrial, post-capitalist and the tension between the post-individual and hyperindividualism, also thinking about the way in which critical positions which were significant for me – Situationism and McLuhanism, for instance – are today ignored or forgotten, and how more recent terms that I think encode important insights – third places, heteroglossia, superdiversity – remain marginal and under-examined. I will try to unpack these musings on these pages very soon…
“Post-Modernism, which deals with the past like one huge antique supermarket, looks very relevant indeed. Pastiche and parody is just an uncomfortable transition to a time when period references will be used without any self-consciousness.” – Peter York, StyleWars, 1980
At the very end of September this year came another example of a UK school seeking to police its students’ language and to ban the use of slang and colloquialisms. I have been writing about youth slang since 1990 (there are numerous articles on this site, accessible by entering slang, youth or MLE in the search box) and about such interventions for more than a decade: this time I spoke to the Guardian‘s Social Affairs Correspondent Rob Booth and his article is here…*
September 2021 also saw the fruition, or culmination (portentous words) of a long-term project of mine dealing with the same topic: the rich, creative, controversial use of highly informal language by younger speakers. I have collected the multicultural slang, traded among younger people and used especially in urban centres across the UK. I have listed authentic examples of this language variety gathered from conversations, messaging, fieldwork interviews and donations and stored these in the Archive of Slang and New Language which I have curated at King’s College London.
Looking for a way to make this data available to the widest possible readership – whether students, teachers, researchers, fellow lexicographers or simply individuals fascinated by language change and novelty – I decided against traditional publishing in hardcopy in favour of putting the material online and so was gratified when, a year ago, the University of Aston’s Institute for Forensic Linguistics agreed to host an extract from the Archive, an up-to-date Glossary of UK Youth Slang, in its Forensic Linguistics Databank. This lexicon, very modest in its format but unique in the UK and I think in the wider Anglosphere, has just been made accessible. I hope it will be helpful for interested parties and I urge anyone consulting it to comment, criticise and, above all, send me additions for inclusion in future versions (rights to the content are restricted, so please don’t circulate it or republish it without full acknowledgement). I am constantly updating and expanding this and other datasets of nonstandard and socially significant language as well as teaching and broadcasting about them.
I am very grateful indeed to all the collaborators, colleagues, students, parents, youth workers and many others who have helped me to record and analyse this exciting, inventive, sophisticated and technically innovative language – and to celebrate it rather than decry and stigmatise it in doing so.
* Rob Booth’s Guardian article was rewritten very slightly and republished by the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. I think the last word on my contribution to the subject, and indeed my career, should go to the anonymous poster of a comment following the Mail‘s piece…
On Burnout, Decompression, Re-entry Syndrome– and Calling It a Day
Still mulling over the words of Dr Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation, who described plans by the UK Government for a general relaxation of COVID-protection policies in ten days time as ‘moral emptiness and epidemiological stupidity’, I was invited to join a discussion on London’s Voice of Islam radio station about the notion of ‘Pandemic Fatigue’ and its implications.
The full discussion is here, with my contribution beginning at 44 minutes…
We can see then, that ‘pandemic fatigue’ can sometimes be a useful, neutral, technical designation, and this is how the WHO itself presented it in 2020…
We can become aware, too, that ‘pandemic fatigue’ is a very conflicted term: although used by the WHO and by ‘ordinary’ people to describe their very real exhaustion, it has also been used, like ‘compliance fatigue’ by authorities to blame the public for disobeying…
Despite being locked down myself, in exile for the moment, this was another busy day, with long, mainly heated and indignant discussions taking place on Twitter of what ‘indigenous’ might mean in the context of the UK, triggered by the assertion by Tory MP Andrew Bridgen that the ‘indigenous’ population of the UK will not tolerate immigration. The offending word is an ambiguous and context-dependent term currently. Recent examples have referred to Canada’s First Nations in the harrowing context of deaths in schools where indigenous children were confined. I don’t think it has been used by any reputable specialists in or about the UK, and its use at a time when an England football team of very mixed origins is being celebrated seems crass and provocative. (We don’t know who the ‘original’ inhabitants of the British Isles were, because there was no written record until 55 BCE, but they certainly immigrated, or invaded and colonised as did all the subsequent settler groups.)
On BBC Radio Bristol I once again answered listeners’ queries on the the etymology of popular expressions. This time, perhaps aptly in present circumstances, the phrase was ‘call it a day.’ First recorded in 1838 by US writer Joseph C Nolan in hisCharcoal Sketches – A Study in the Humor of the Old Northeast, it was in the form ‘call it half a day’ and seems to have reflected the mixed feelings of weariness and resistance on the part of workers from the Philadelphia slums, deciding to knock off early or to award themselves a half-day holiday. By 1919, as the USA wearily emerged from war, the usage had mutated into ‘call it a day’: in 1938 ‘call it a night’ was first recorded.
I called it a day myself, at nine o’clock on a warm evening, pleased to have been awarded nine out of ten in a facetious Twitter competition for a photo of my hand, and recalling the louche philosopher Gurdjieff’s realisation that he had progressed from drinking from glasses to drinking from “what are called ‘tumblers'”…
There are several articles on jargon elsewhere on this site, and in 2018 I wrote about the proliferation of acronyms and their effect on listeners and readers too (that article is here*). Now in 2021 the cult ‘appointment television’ crime series Line of Duty has reignited debate on the status of codes and abbreviations as a mainstay of officialese and the private, exclusive languages that both fascinate and intimidate the public. The long-running hit police drama The Bill is due to return to screens very soon, no doubt introducing civilians to some updated terminology and slang of its own.
In March I spoke to Amit Katwala, who was researching this topic for Wired magazine, and the resulting article is here, followed for any students, teachers – and fans of Line of Duty – by a list of links to sources of both real-life and fictional acronyms and discussion of them…
While the Sun satirises them, the Guardian has perceptively gone beyond the linguistic challenges and plot contortions in Line of Duty and detected underlying references to current political realities…
I have been trying to tell the world for a long time that slang is a rich, creative and complex feature of language, and one which has great social and cultural significance. I have argued (again and again) against those who want to ban or censor it and have advocated instead teaching young people about it so that they can judge for themselves its qualities and refine their own usage of it where necessary. What I have hesitated to do is to actually ‘teach slang’ to younger learners, knowing that it is still a controversial (linguists use terms like ‘stigmatised’ and ‘transgressive’) variety which makes many parents, teachers and authority figures uncomfortable. Connie Chang, writing for the National Geographic asked me whether it could ever be possible to teach slang to younger children without risk. In her published article, quoting experts in the field, she describes some interesting developments which suggest a positive answer.
Here is Connie’s article, followed by some further thoughts and some links which illustrate and explore the issues raised. I hope these, along with other articles on this site (put ‘slang‘, ‘MLE‘, ‘youth language‘ into the search box or check the tags at the foot of the page) will help students and teachers, and language-buffs, too, who are ready to explore the language ecosystem in which slang flourishes and operates…
Experimenting with language and inventing new language begins naturally in children as soon as they move from making noises to uttering more complex sounds. The creation by babies of seemingly meaningful sound combinations and, soon after, approximations of words is known as jargoning. Toddlers will make up words, participate in babytalk and banter and soon join their older siblings and other family members in inventing nicknames for objects in the home – part of the private domestic language known as familect. As young people encounter new experiences in growing up – dating, grappling with parents and teachers, following fashions and admiring celebrities, and experiment with new behaviour – they often feel they need a new language to describe these things and to convey the novel and intense feelings they have. Adults don’t have a vocabulary for ‘jumping up and grabbing someone’s sweater from behind’, (‘glomping’) or ‘coolest boy in the class’, (‘peng-ting’) so kids need to create their own. Young people also don’t want adults to know what they are up to or what they are feeling, hence the online and messaging codes and abbreviations (‘POS’ for ‘parent over shoulder’, ‘FOMO’ for fear of missing out) and the new, exotic and, for parents and teachers, impenetrable language. In the UK and the US there have been many not-entirely-serious guides for parents to help them…
Slang’s power and resonance is that it’s an alternative, subversive language and that for people who don’t understand it, slang can make them uncomfortable and can feel like a violation of social norms. The 19th century US author Ambrose Bierce defined slang in his Devil’s Dictionary as follows: ‘The grunt of the human hog (Pignoramus intolerabilis) with an audible memory. The speech of one who utters with his tongue what he thinks with his ear, and feels the pride of a creator in accomplishing the feat of a parrot. A means (under Providence) of setting up as a wit without a capital of sense.’ He may have been being ironic but this was certainly the view of many at that time, witness this report of a Victorian lecture…
Strong disapproval of slang continues in the 21st century. Some years ago I debated with Lindsey Johns, at that time campaigning publicly against those like me who he accused of promoting ‘ghetto grammar’ in the UK…
It is sometimes hard to observe the impartiality required of someone who poses as an expert in one or other field. For me it has been particularly difficult to embrace – or to feign – objectivity in trying to record and analyse the language controversies of the last two years. Tracking the rancorous, divisive language of the campaign for Brexit, the gaslighting and firehosing indulged in by Donald Trump’s media supporters and, more recently still, the mixed messaging, pivoting and bamboozling (to use the kindest words I can think of ) accompanying the UK government’s managing of the pandemic, has sorely tested the fraying, threadbare notion of even-handedness (itself unsurprisingly mocked these days as ‘both-sidesism’ or ‘whataboutery’).
In fact, of course, anyone reading my posts (elsewhere on this site) on the toxic terminology of populism and the ‘coronaspeak’ generated by the virus will quickly see that I have fallen short, on many occasions allowing my impatience and disapproval to show through a veneer of scholarly restraint.
I did not even want to engage with the latest controversy to erupt into the UK’s national conversation. I am, at a considerable distance, not in favour of hereditary monarchies. I try never to read the press reports of the behaviour of royal family members, and, above all, never to be tempted to comment, however flagrant the untruths being traded by politicians or the unfairness of the campaigns mounted by the tabloids or the expressions of envy, spite and malice by ‘royal correspondents’ and the population at large.
In any case, who am I to pronounce on such subjects? An obscure lexicographer and sometime teacher of languages, a very long way down the lines of succession and without a constituency or a following. Nevertheless, among the invariably hostile treatments of some of the younger royals, I could not help noticing some which seem to be based on linguistic discriminations, language-based prejudices and false assumptions about how language works. Thus it was (horrible expression, I apologise) that I agreed to talk to Bridie Pearson-Brown of the Daily Mail about this week’s ‘bombshell interview’ between Oprah Winfrey and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, hoping I admit, not just to offer some objective comments, but perhaps to redress the balance of ‘analysis’ in the poor Duchess’s favour.
Here is the article in question, which appeared halfway down a front page containing several dozen articles focusing on the same celebrity, most of them – no, I think all of them – overtly or implicitly hostile.
This wasn’t in fact the first time I had commented on Meghan Markle’s way of speaking. Last time, too, I tried to counter the xenophobic assumptions and the ‘misogynoir’ sneering, the framing of her coming to terms with her changing linguistic surroundings as something insincere or evidence of bad faith. That article, from May 2020, is here. Its precepts still stand…although predictably Prince Harry was yesterday accused of ‘sounding American’ (the expert ‘analysis’ of his intonation and word-choices was wrong: he simply softened a couple of British consonants in accommodating Oprah)…
Why Meghan sounds American again: Linguistic expert reveals Duchess of Sussex has her native accent back as she’s no longer displaying ‘linguistic accommodation’
By Bridie Pearson-Jones for MailOnline
Meghan Markle’s accent has returned to her natural Californian as she is ‘relaxed’ and is no longer displaying ‘linguistic accommodation’, an expert revealed.
Speaking to Femail, Tony Thorne, a language consultant at King’s College, London explained: ‘There’s a thing called linguistic accommodation where you change the way you talk to fit in with the people around you.
‘This is very very common even within the UK, if you’re speaking to a Geordie, someone from Liverpool or an Australian you begin to very slightly change your accent to become closer to them.’
During Meghan’s time in the UK, fans noted that her accent appeared to becoming more British as she spent more time in the country.
Viewers said Meghan Markle sounded British in a 2018 ITV documentary, Queen of Her World, where she appeared to reunite with her wedding dress
Tony continued: ‘For most people if they’re authentic and sincere they will keep their basic accent with slight changes. I’ve seen friends from London move to Newcastle – and you’ll start to hear bits of comments of the local accent.
‘It might take a normal person six months or a year for their accent to change, but when you’re a celebrity and have to be on show and are super self-conscious about image it will happen faster. I don’t think its surprising that it would be a more conscious choice for someone like Meghan, as she’s tries to project herself in a way that will fit in with environment.’
Tony, who knew Princess Diana ‘slightly’, added that he doesn’t imagine Prince Harry’s accent will become American despite the move to California – but the current generation of royals have eased their accents to sound more like a common Brit.
‘The British ruling classes are very attached, so I can’t imagine Meghan’s husband sounding American,’ he said. That said, since Princess Diana joined the family, the royals have modified their natural accent to sound less posh.
‘I was very conscious when she changed her accent, then William and Harry did too. They use the ‘non-posh’ glottal stop – so they pronounce words like ‘bottle’ as ‘bot-al’ to sounds less like the extreme British upper class. This is why the young royals sound very different to the Queen or Prince Philip.
‘Now Meghan is back in California, she’s reverting to her natural accent. It maybe not the same as her parents or what she had as a young girl – but it’s a glamorous, educated, prestigious Californian accent which is, much more relaxed than a British accent or even an American east coast accent.
‘Nobody can tell if she’s made a conscious decision to change her voice, but she’s very bright and aware and under intense scrutiny so I think it would be understandable if she did.’
tony thorne 