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Manhattan In The Mirror Of Slang Analysis

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Manhattan in the Mirror of Slang/ New York City Life and Popular Speech New York City Life and Popular Speech The hundreds, even thousands, of words and phrases of slang and other popular speech about life in New York, especially Manhattan, are a treasure trove of social and cultural history. A distinctive word culture of social life in the city flowed from the modern cycle of urban growth that started significantly in the 1840s. These words about the city, individually and taken together, retell in a new voice the story of metropolitan life down to the 1950s, when so much national attention began to turn away from the culture of the old metropolitan core and towards the suburbs. Many of these word images of the city are still in …show more content…

Slang shares indistinct boundaries with other informal levels of vocabulary, such as colloquial usages, subgroup argots and regional, class, and ethnic dialects. Slang is such a slippery concept that the idea of “popular speech” a broader concept that includes slang, is not preferred by many writers on language. Popular speech, most simply put, may be said to be those words and phrases that are not standard, formal or academic, or at least were not in their bloom. The related idea of “street speech” lays stress on the urban side of popular …show more content…

The subgroup or subcultural origins of general slang include social classes, genders, sexual interests, all majority and minority ethnic groups, regional groups, age groups, many occupational specialties, a host of life-style and consumer cultures, and all the so-called deviant subcultures. Everyone, especially city people, belongs to a variety of these overlapping subgroups. Some of the most intense subcultures have their own dialects or varieties of English that exist in degrees of distinction from standard speech. Each variety, and most are merely emerging, may include distinctive pronunciations, special words or special meanings of ordinary words, or even grammatical differences. There is no single New York dialect or accent of English, but there are as many varieties of speech as there are major social

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