I’ve been researching slang and throwing it into dictionaries for forty years. I’m still at it and have no intention, prior to crashing forward onto the keyboard, of stopping. But while I’ve been able to answer a few questions – e.g. fuck does not come from fornicate under command of the King, and shit doesn’t mean store high in transit –the one has always eluded me is this: what is the relationship of women to slang? We know, all too well, about women in slang and we need only one word to cover all the others: misogyny. But how about women and slang?
There are maybe 10,000 woman-related terms in the English vocabulary, if you include the vagina (1500 words alone, the same as the penis), the breasts, heterosexual and lesbian intercourse and the language of commercial sex. It’s all about the ‘male gaze’: is she sexy or prudish, is she pretty or plain, is she complaisant or argumentative.
For many users – experts and amateurs alike – this is as it should be. Surely slang epitomizes what the linguist Dale Spender, who was looking at every variety of English, called a ‘man-made’ language. Its obsessions – sex (and sex work) and the giblets we do it with, intoxication by drink or drugs, insults, racism, crime and a range of terms that are about as far from ‘woke’ as one could imagine – are seen as male preoccupations. Caring, sharing and compassion: no thanks. And love? Oh FFS! Around 140,000 terms to date, and every one coined by a bloke.
But slang is noteworthy for mocking rules. Its primary characteristic, in my opinion, is sedition, taking the piss, in its own coarse words. So why should received wisdom actually be wise?
Eighteen months or so ago I set out to find out: how do women deal with slang on their own terms. In my book Sounds & Furies: the love-hate relationship between women and slang, I’ve tried to see whether there actually exists a women’s slang. A female-created, female-used vocabulary that runs in parallel to the ‘man-made’ version. I’d like to proclaim victory, but on the whole I can’t. We have plentiful evidence of women using slang ever since the first small glossaries appeared, around 1530, but if there is a woman’s slang, then, frustratingly, it hasn’t emerged. Or not for me.
It's true that slang has never featured in ‘polite’ society. But that’s what makes it ‘polite’. Women were not meant to use slang, let alone invent it, which meant that those who did have traditionally been outside that world: sex workers, fishwives (thus ‘Billingsgate’ as a synonym for obscenity), entertainers and so on. It also helped badge a succession of ‘new women’: as well as smoking, riding bicycles and, heaven forfend, having sex, they also talked slang.
On the whole they used the same words as the men. But does that make such words ‘man-made’? How do we know whether a man or woman coined a term? Even the ‘F-word’ might have first emerged from female lips, very possibly as ‘Fuck off!’
Of course if this is so important, why has it been left untouched for so long? In short, ease of access. If slang itself is hard enough to research — at least until relatively recently — then the use of slang by women, already excluded from the centres of power, is even harder to nail down. This, I would suggest, is changing.
Today slang seems to be available across the female world. Social media is pretty much run by young women. Slang comes naturally. A core word like selfie may be mainstream now, but it started in slang world. On fleek, looking good, was associated with a teenage coiner, Peaches Monroe.
Finally, a hat-tip to Mumsnetters, whose own in-house vocabulary needs no introduction. But from the lexicographer’s point of view it is showing a take on slang that is something new. Take what some might term the considerate (and others the passive-aggressive) AIBU (am I being unreasonable?) which creates a number of answers: YABU (you are…), YANBU (you are not…) and so on. Can we really imagine men creating an equivalent? Perhaps women-only language does exist after all.
Sounds & Furies: the love-hate relationship between women and slang is available on Amazon