Slang Evolution Quotes

Faggot never meant "gay" when I was a kid. You kind of knew that you could call a gay person faggot if you were ignorant, but nobody ever called someone a faggot if they were gay.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.

Slang has always moved this way. From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they're tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.

I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.

I was like, "This is a new thing that the gay people have decided? That's the gayest thing I've ever heard in my life." You can't do that. You can't decide that a word is forbidden now collectively amongst your group of human beings, that the word is a slanderous evil nasty word about homosexuals. It's not, the word doesn't mean that. And sometimes it's a good word to use in comedy. That's what your friend has to realize when he's at a bar just yelling out the word.

A Pike, in the California dialect, is a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, 'a Pike County man,' was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.'

I think the problem with people, as they start to mature, they say, 'Rap is a young man's game,' and they keep trying to make young songs. But you don't know the slang - it changes every day, and you're just visiting. So you're trying to be something you're not, and the audience doesn't buy into that.

I love being in a public space where teenagers are talking. And the funny thing is that it hasn't changed that much. There's certainly slang that I'm not familiar with, but among the average teen, it's still the same.

Other dances are like languages, like French or Spanish, but my steps are slang, and slang is always changing.

I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.

You can say now, 'I dissed him' - to diss, I dissed him - or, 'Stop dissing her'. And that's the interesting thing, that it's the prefix that's become the verb! It's a most remarkable development.