- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Well, my longer post was a more general take on how something like an accent or a dialect forms. And I'm sure linguists have an actual theory of it, I've read a lot about American English but I haven't read linguistics itself, if that makes sense (like reading history but not reading historiography). Slang is an interesting complication to it because it too is in some sense mutation, but more purposeful, and everyone has slang. Not really that different, though. Someone comes up with some silly joke word for a thing that they personally use and it catches on in their friends, family, coworkers, church, whatever. Usually the thing stays contained, sometimes through sheer luck or certain factors making that person attractive (people adjust their language, subconsciously, to mimic those they admire or otherwise need to suck up to) help it along. Then it becomes so widespread it turns into slang. Slang itself is really just language that the frigid English professor doesn't accept yet, a lot of stuff so common to our standard, modern vocabulary was slang in the past.Bro that is pure cope, that's basically just the "glass half full" equivalent of exactly what I said. Also that would imply that black people don't try to out-do each other with their lingo coming up with ridiculous fucking terms like "glizzy" just to be increasingly obscure. There is no fucking way that hot dog turned into fucking "glizzy" through the natural evolution of language.
There's no connection from "hot dog" to "glizzy," but how the fuck do you get from "sausage" to "hot dog?"
But, it is true, I'd say, that Blacks have a strong cultural preference for slang more so than Whites do. I see it as a reflection of a freer spirit in general, they're looser with their music, looser with their public behavior (emotional expressiveness/lack of inhibition). Blacks have a sort of willingness to fool around and goof off more than White Americans do and are proud of that. I don't see it as a bad thing, if anything it's one of their most admirable traits.