Facts about Slang
- 08
Japanese youth in the 1970s created kaomoji emoticons like (^_^) and (T_T) in online forums, predating Western emoticons by over a decade and influencing modern emoji design.
- 07
Nineteenth-century Australian convicts developed rhyming slang independently from London, creating expressions like Captain Cook for look to communicate secretly among themselves and avoid detection by guards.
- 06
Valley girl speech patterns, popularized in 1980s California through the movie Heathers and songs like "Like a Virgin," introduced uptalk and the word "like" as filler into mainstream American slang.
- 05
In 2000s prison slang, the term "snitch" evolved into "rat" or "cheese eater," reflecting a coded vocabulary system inmates developed to communicate about informants without detection by guards.
- 04
Yiddish immigrants in 1920s-1930s New York contributed words like chutzpah and schmooze to American slang, significantly enriching English vocabulary through Yiddish-influenced speech patterns.
- 03
Internet slang acronyms like LOL, which originated in 1980s bulletin board systems, became so widespread that Oxford Dictionaries named it Word of the Year in 2011.
- 02
British cockney rhyming slang, which emerged in 1840s London working-class communities, deliberately obscures meanings by replacing words with rhyming phrases like apples and pears for stairs.
- 01
The term "cool" meaning excellent entered African American slang around the 1930s and became mainstream in the 1950s through jazz culture and musicians like Miles Davis.