Chilling on campus lately, it may be a surprise that we are no longer in the city of Montreal. No folks, we now reside on “Mount-Real.” You heard it from me — the latest slang word from the peak is the one and only Mount-Real.
But this begs the question: who in their right mind came up with that cant? Let alone classics such as “T-dot-O-dot” (Toronto) or “Sascatch” (Saskatchewan). And let us not forget such colourful expressions as “Sweet,” “Dope,” “Slammin,” “Trippin,” “Smooth,” “Dude”; the list continues.
Slang has forever been a phenomenon of culture. It shows itself verbally, physically and in writing, and in recent days it is at the heart of pop culture. So much so in fact that sometimes it seems excessive.
Slang is a language in and of itself. Come on, for those of you who remember good old Clueless a few years back, Alicia Silverstone made popular “whatever” as the say all and end all of conversations. So in the spirit of “keeping it real” and to avoid any “busted caps in my ass,” I’ll coin a term to “keep ya’ll up on my flow”: “Slanguage.”
If you have never before considered the origins of your own slanguage, I must inform you it is not a pretty history. Slanguages as we know them today mostly find their roots in thieves and criminals of the eighteenth-century where slanguage was only used to term words for sex, women and alcohol. Hmm, old-school gang related? Maybe. But the story goes back much further.
According to a Berlin Language Institute study, slanguage began way back in year 1066. Back then it was known as English. English was the bastard language. The idea of formal or proper English was “considered gratuitous at best.”
Based on the study, we know from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (1387-1400) that traveled English-men of the Middle-Ages “had an ear for regional differences in pronunciation, grammar and some vocabulary.” But this only tells us that slanguage was merely a natural evolution in terms of regionalization, duh.
