Quotes about slang

A collection of quotes on the topic of slang, language, use, likeness.

Quotes about slang

“I showered the slang, simple as ABC's / Skip over the D's and rock the microphone with ease”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

E's
"313"
1990s, Infinite (1996)

“Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities.. about immigration who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Source: Propaganda (1928), p.59

Men, Idea, Support, Sport

“She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Dogs, Color, Cats, Bee

“If that impression does not remain on this intrepid and powerful people, into whose veins all nations pour their mingling blood, it will be our immense calamity. Public action, without it, will lose the dignity of consecration. Eloquence, without it, will miss what is loftiest, will give place to a careless and pulseless disquisition, or fall to the flatness of political slang. Life, without it, will lose its sacred and mystic charm. Society, without it, will fail of inspirations, and be drowned in an animalism whose rising tides will keep pace with its wealth.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 23.

Life, People, Animals, Wealth

“I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Hitler: The Missing Years" - Page 67 - by Ernst Hanfstaengl, John Toland - 1994

Money, Pain, People, Secret

“It is an irony to see in some Muslim societies someone who curses God, in his daily slang when angry, go out and protest against the Danish cartoons about the Prophet.”

Yasser Harrak Canadian liberal writer, columnist and human rights activist

Yasser Harrak. 2010. "Origins of Insluting Islam in the Sunna and in Muslim societies". Annabaa Information Network. Accessed January 20, 2010. http://annabaa.org/nbanews/2010/05/243.htm

God

“Hate gave birth to the slang; Slang (‘argot’) exists not anymore.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) French writer

( « L'argot est né de la haine, il n'existe plus» Arts, 6. February 1957. in À l’agité du bocal et autres textes, (op. cit.) p. 55.

Hate, Birth

“The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Defendant

"A Defence of Slang"
The Defendant (1901)

“Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"Epitaph on the Politician Himself"
Hilaire Belloc (1925)

“Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 358

Way

“Any cipher can be broken, any code can be compromised. But the most exact academic knowledge of a language gives no clue to its slang, its colloquial allusions, its half statements, over statements, and inverted meanings.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Sixth Column

Source: Sixth Column (1949; originally serialized in 1941), Chapter 9 (p. 113)

Knowledge

“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Defendant

" A Defense of Slang http://books.google.com/books?id=8WpaAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;all+slang+is+metaphor+and+all+metaphor+is+poetry&quot;&pg=PA110#v=onepage" <br class="br">The Defendant (1901)

“My dad loved using the word “ain’t.” He said it was the best damn slang word invented by the Americans.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Love

“We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into his hat.”

William J. Locke book The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne

The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905), p. 97.

People, History, Wealth, Happiness

“I have tried, in this book, to do three things. I try first to bring a greater awareness of the way in which the differences and the similarities in the bodies of human beings are the basis on which all our learnings about our sex, and our relationship to the other sex, are built. Talking about our bodies is a complex and difficult matter. We are so used to covering them up, to referring to them obliquely with slang terms or in a borrowed language to hiding even infants' sex membership under blue and pink ribbons. It is difficult to become aware of those things about us which have been, and will always be, patterned by our own particular modesties and reticences. We reject, and very rightly, catalogues of caresses arranged in frequency tables, or accounts of childhood that read like a hospital chart…”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 4-5

Books, Sex, Way, Learning

“[T]hat's how a language grows. Old words die - or take on a new life. New words appear. Language wordstock is replenished, refreshed, and the language remains vibrant and serviceable, ready to describe new concepts, ideas, and objects. Many language purists object to this way of growth. But we have to remember that just as yesterday's liberal is often tomorrow's conservative, in many cases, what was considered slang in the past, eventually acquires respectability.”

Anu Garg (1967) Indian author

Life, Way, Idea, Appearance

“I knew she wasn't English
Because she spoke it far too well
The grammar was goodly, the verbs as they should be
And the slang was bang on the bell
So as the language barrier clanged and banged
I couldn't hear--hear or see
England, London, and Bow
Crumbled into the sea.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

Recited on Newsnight with Kirsty Wark, December 22, 2004
Lyrics and poetry

Sea

“…slang…the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

Home

“The consciousness in [Australia and New Zealand] of the elevation of a substandard dialect into a national tongue has been responsible for a mixture of attitudes to citizens of the mother country - inferiority, defiance, contempt. A blending of the first two may be responsible for the upward intonation pattern of answers, more appropriate to questions…. slang is of its nature defiant. It is also demotic…. But the ruling class of Australia is itself demotic.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

Question, Nature, Country

“The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of language. For example, there are several languages based on the Roman alphabet of only 26 letters. Yet by arranging these in different orders, we’ve added several hundred thousand words to English since the 5th century, and many of them were completely new. The principle is the same in genetics. There are millions of named and classified species of life, all of them based on a variable arrangement of only four chemical components. For another example, we know that Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all evolved from Latin, a vernacular which is now extinct. Each of these newer tongues emerged via a slow accumulation of their own unique slang lingo –thus diverging into new dialects, and eventually distinct forms of gibberish such that the new Romans could no longer communicate with either Parisians or Spaniards. Similarly, if we took an original Latin speaking population and divided them sequestered in complete isolation over several centuries, they might still be able to understand each other, or their jargon may have become unintelligible to foreigners. But they won’t start speaking Italian or Romanian because identical vocabularies aren’t going to occur twice.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008) <br class="br">Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Communication, Understanding

“Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of dissipation." I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I daresay Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to niece Anna (1814-09-28) regarding a character in Anna's novel [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“Why ‘threep’? Why ‘clank’? Slang happens.”

John Scalzi book Lock In

Source: Lock In (2014), Chapter 2 (p. 28)

“Slang is a foul pool at which every dunce fills his bucket, and then sets up as a fountain.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 369

“I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you're out of sand, then you must burn up.”

Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) American author and screenwriter

Drink, Alcohol, Water, Thinking

“The above provides the most perfect illustration of Witzel’s mode of academic(?) discussion: he does not raise points because he believes in them and wants to get them either clarified or accepted; he raises them only to heckle and raise a din, like a speaker in a political harangue or a schoolboy in a school slanging match between two rival groups, where the same accusation is repeated again and again with a deaf ear turned to the response or clarification.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Michael Witzel – An Examination of his Review of my Book (2001)

School, Perfection

“Hip-hop saved me,. It gave me permission to use language in a certain way. It validated my community and my friends. It gave our slang a certain elegance. I have a chip on my shoulder I pet every morning, a constant feeling like I have something to prove. Hearing that the canon can’t be diversified, there’s no room for more brown faces—that fueled my fire. I loved music that people said was not music, that it was too violent, too crass, too sexual. And now everyone in the world is rapping Hamilton.”

Jason Reynolds (1983) author of young adult novels

As quoted in [Corbett, Sue, Jason Reynolds Is the Hardest-Working Man in Washington, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/74244-jason-reynolds-is-the-hardest-working-man-in-washington.html, Publishers Weekly, 10 March 2020, July 14, 2017]

People, Communication, Music, Way

“Contemporary slang reflects this animal state: children are "mice," "rabbits," "kittens," women are called "chicks," in England "birds," "hens," "dumb clucks," "silly geese," "old mares," "bitches."”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Similar terminology is used about males as a defamation of character, or more broadly only about pressed males males: stud, wold, cat, stag, jack - and then it is used much more rarely, and often with a specifically sexual connotation.

Chapter Four
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Bitch, Children, Animals, Bird

“I don't have an English sense of humor. In my language, I have tons of it. In English, you have to really get the slang, and the culture.”

Chow Yun-fat (1955) Hong Kong actor

Interview with Chow Yun Fat https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2009-04-01/3 (April 1, 2009)

Sense