The takeaway language of slang by James Sharpe - TLS

These two rather different yet equally fascinating works raise some fundamental thoughts about the nature and function of slang, a word itself of uncertain derivation. All students of the subject will agree that it is at once, like fashion in clothing, a means of inclusion and exclusion, whether for Tudor vagrants, nineteenth-century Oxbridge undergraduates, or modern gays or drug-users. Cracking the code that slang can constitute therefore admits outsiders, if only vicariously, to a new, and often deviant, cultural environment. Thus the early commentators on cant seem to have been fully aware that the terms they listed not only represented the argot of underworld characters conspiring against the norms of straight society, but also constituted a safe means of access to members of straight society into a world of adventure and freedom from convention.

Link:
The takeaway language of slang by James Sharpe - TLS

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's the Matter With Cultural Studies?

A timely article, a semi-obituary. . . But I still have hope that the history of cultural studies might matter to the university—and to the world beyond it. My hopes aren't quite as ambitious as they were 20 years ago. I no longer expect cultural studies to transform the disciplines. But I do think cultural studies can do a better job of complicating the political-economy model in media theory, a better job of complicating our accounts of neoliberalism, and a better job of convincing people inside and outside the university that cultural studies' understanding of hegemony is a form of understanding with great explanatory power—that is to say, a form of understanding that actually works. Link: http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-the-Matter-With/48334/
Read more

Remembering Maninder Singh Kang

Image
(18.5.1963-4.2.2013) By Rajesh Sharma I visualize him watching his own burning corpse and laughing a philosopher’s laughter. “Oye pandatā , this Kang was a dog’s tail of a man. Look, he is poking even the flames to laugh. What a struggle the wind and the fire are waging over his body. And look at the rain, it refuses to stop. His death seems to have released an excess of the five bhoots , making nature go berserk.”                 Listening to him, I try to make sense of his bizarre inner geography.                 “He’ll be impossible to replace. It’s such a loss,” he adds in an altogether different mood.       Maninder had this ability to move effortlessly between gaiety and gravity. He probably had found the thread that connects the extremes.                 I met him some twenty years ago when he arrived to teach in the college where I was already teaching. That college, in Hoshiarpur, had then a Principal who liked to take himself very seriously. And he
Read more

You don't know (A poem by Pash)

  Translated from Punjabi by Rajesh Sharma you don ’ t know how I ’ m counted in poetry: like some carcass-eating dog that has strayed into a full-blown mujra   perhaps you wonder what I write late into the nights in the light of a lamp for some party engaged in dangerous things   you don ’ t know how I go to poetry: like a rustic woman in new clothes of outworn fashion who steps, bewildered, into city shops   I ask of poetry nail polish for you coloured embroidery thread for my younger sister bitter medicine to treat father ’ s cataract   poetry sees mischief in such demands   every month night after night it sends for me its sentinels carrying batons of cane and guns with polished butts they take away my beloved books my childhood picture from the shelf and my first love ’ s cry that slipped on the stairs and, hurt, was broken into a disconsolate rainbow   you don ’ t know that the policemen who know me
Read more