Some Problems in the Study of Campus Slang

Abstract

FOLLOWING THE FIRST APPEARANCE of Berrey and Van den Bark's disLtinguished American Thesaurus of Slang' in I942, a number of separate observations continued to be made on campus slang without, as a rule, pointing to some of the unique problems involved. For obvious considerations of size, the ATS was unable to lavish additional space on subtleties or distinctions in vocabulary. One must supplement this work with Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang2 and with a number of shorter studies of the sort which have appeared in this journal.3 The lists provided in these shorter studies are useful, as my own citations will indicate; but they fail to distinguish, except casually, between what is unique at the particular campus discussed and what may be shared with other campuses or even with other occupational groups. The result is that the lists either confirm, usefully enough, the continued life of familiar words and expressions or add some which are new but cannot always be delimited geographically. This article is intended as a preliminary survey of problems in the collection and analysis of the student slang vocabulary. This vocabulary is, to begin with, much less circumscribed than that spoken, say, by lumberjacks or by stagehands. Many different geographical areas and social backgrounds are represented on a campus, at least on a relatively large one; and some students, through summer employment, may have absorbed these same closed vocabularies of trades or technical skills.