The opposite of Latin

rogersgeorge on December 3rd, 2016

If Latin is as high-falootin a language as you can have, what’s the lowest? Slang, of course. Everybody disparages slang, and everybody uses it. I suppose we mainly differ in which slang words we use, and which we don’t.

I’m not going to say a whole lot about this subject except to say that some folks study the topic rather seriously (I suppose everything is a topic of serious study for somebody), and a dictionary of slang was just released, and it’s online! That means you can go read it!

Green’s Dictionary of Slang

And for a commentary, go here.

This thing has a lot of words that I didn’t even know were words. Browse around and you might notice that a lot of accepted words started out as slang, and maybe some words that you think are slang aren’t. Try looking up your name.

Sometimes I wonder how Mr. Green defined slang. I looked up “roger” and didn’t see a reference to it as a synonym for yes or agreement.

Anyway, I invite you to go waste some time looking up some words.

2 Responses to “The opposite of Latin”

  1. I would consider “roger” to be jargon instead of slang. The difference between them might be a good future topic.

    What is lesser or higher is a matter of perspective which this video does a good job of explaining (I think).

    https://youtu.be/wA2xRVMOThc

  2. You are correct on each count!

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