Does slang enter the written language faster nowadays?


Today over on the fascinating blog "Separated by a Common Language," Lynneguist says this in her discussion of the origins of the word "eyeball" in the measuring/estimating sense:

But since it's slang, we'd expect that it goes back quite a bit further in the spoken language than in written sources--we just can't pinpoint when.

That got me wondering whether this is changing in our current publishing culture--as more magazines and even newspapers try to be "zippy," are we creating a much shorter "distance" between slang creation and slang documentation (first appearance in print)?

I know in my own career this is true; at the women's service magazine I worked at in 1994, we weren't particularly out in front. We used some slang, but usually not the newest. It didn't fit our tone, and probably not our readership.

At my current pub, our publishers are pressing us to be "zippier." So we make more cultural references, and use more cultural references.

And the Web is going to really change that. I use web searches even know to find out how (or even whether) a slang term is used by different groups of people. If there's a way of holding onto some of the reader-posted, non-edited/filtered material on the Web, etymologists will be able to date word origins much more accurately.

How fast does your publication adopt/accept slang terms?

(someday I'll figure out how to do a blogroll, I promise)

Look It Up

Over on Language Log, there's a post on a Cupertino error related to the word "highfalutin"--the spell checker changed it to "high flatulence," apparently bcs it was originally entered as two words.



high flatulence


I would never have thought it was one word--In fact, I'd have hyphenated it.

I think I'd only use it as an adj phrase before a noun--"that's a bunch of high-falutin' nonsense," but never "his comments are always high-falutin'."

Note the apostrophe to stand in for the g.

(falutin' apparently coming from "flute," perhaps, maybe, sez M-W)

Would *you* have automatically made it one word?

I'm just checking to see how this works.

Did you know that the word "buff" (as in, a big fan) comes from the word "buff" meaning buff leather (which is an unfinished leather), and comes from the word "buffalo" (but not the American buffalo, also called a bison; rather, from European buffalo)?

That "buff leather" has also come to mean the color buff--a light tan.