1849. Kingsley, Alton Locke, ii. Be quiet, you fool . . . you're a pretty fellow to chaff the orator; he'll slang you up the chimney before you get your shoes on. Ibid. vi. A tall, handsome, conceited, slangy boy.
1851-61. Mayhew, Lond. Lab., III. 350. To slang with the fishwives.
1852. Bristed, Up. Ten Thousand, 205. Here I have been five days . . . hazing—what you call slanging—upholsterers.
1853. Dickens, Bleak House, xi. His strength lying in a slangular direction. Ibid. (1865), Our Mutual Friend, II. iv. Both were too gaudy, too slangy, too odorous of cigars, and too much given to horseflesh.
1857. H. Reed, Lect. Brit. Poets, ix. 308. A freedom and coarseness of diction denominated slang, a word belonging to the very vocabulary it denotes.
1872. Eliot, Middlemarch, xi. All choice of words is slang. . . . Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
1875. Whitney, Life and Growth of Language, vii. There are grades and uses of slang whose charm no one need be ashamed to feel and confess; it is like reading a narrative in a series of rude and telling pictures instead of in words.
1879-81. Skeat, Etymological Dict., s.v. Slang . . . is from the Norwegian sleng, a slinging, a device, a burden of a song. Slengja, to sling; slengja kieften, to slang, abuse (lit. to sling the jaw; sleng-jenamn, a slang (i.e., an abusive name); slengje-ord, an insulting word; all from slengja, to sling.
1881-9. Encyclopædic Dict, s.v. Slang. A kind of colloquial language current amongst one particular class, or amongst various classes of society, uneducated or educated, but which, not having received the stamp of general approval, is frequently considered as inelegant or vulgar. Almost every profession or calling has its own slang . . . In this sense it means any colloquial words or phrases, vulgar or refined, used conventionally by each particular class of people in speaking of particular matters connected with their own calling. Slang is sometimes allied to, but not quite identical with cant.
1884. H. James, Jr., Little Tour, 89. As the game went on, and he lost . . . he . . . slanged his partner, declared he wouldn't play any more, and went away in a fury.
1886. D. Telegraph, 11 Sep. A tipsy virago slanging the magistrate to the high amusement of the top-booted constables. Ibid., 1 Jan. It is the business of slanginess to make everything ugly. Ibid., 13 Sep. 'Don't be so slangy, Julia,' remonstrates her father.
1888. Poor Nellie, 17. Looked awfully slangy then? I'm sure she was in a wax.
1898. Century Dict., s.v. Slang, 1. The cant words or jargon used by thieves, peddlers, beggars, and the vagabond classes generally. 2. In present use, colloquial words and phrases which have originated in the cant or rude speech of the vagabond or unlettered classes, or, belonging in form to standard speech, have acquired or have had given them restricted, capricious, or extravagantly metaphorical meanings, and are regarded as vulgar or inelegant . . . Slang as such is not necessarily vulgar or ungrammatical; indeed, it is generally correct in idiomatic form, and though frequently censured on this ground, it often, in fact, owes its doubtful character to other causes.
1899. Whiteing, John St., vi. A slanging match . . . and the unnameable in invective and vituperation rises, as in blackest vapour from our pit to the sky.
1900. Nation, 9 Oct., 289. Slang in the sense of the cant language of thieves appears in print as early as the middle of the last century [see quot. 1743 supra]. Scott when using the word felt the necessity of defining it; and his definition shows not only that it was generally unknown but that it had not then begun to depart from its original sense.
2. (old).—A leg iron; a fetter (Grose and Vaux). [Formerly about three three feet long, the slang being attached to an iron anklet rivetted on the leg: the slack (q.v.) was slung to the waistbelt.] Whence (3) = a watch-chain. In Dutch slang, slang = (1) a snake, and (2) a chain.
