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Notes on Slang and Euphemisms in English

&nbsp;&nbsp;Slang is often dubbed "impolite language" and not considered appropriate for formal or serious situations, but slang expressions occur in the speech of well-educated people.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Slang is used in social settings where a person feels comfortable with friends or associates. It adds humor, interest, and intimacy to the conversation. Being rebellious and creative, slang is fundamental to the word-formation processes in English. It usually increases the store of terse and striking words or provides a vocabulary for new shades of meaning. Slang is short-lived. It usually dies out, but sometimes it is incorporated into the standard language. There is no sure test for deciding when an expression is slang or something else. Over the years, the term "slang" has broadened to embrace all sorts of verbal intruders such as jargon, colloquialisms, dialect, and just plain vulgar words; it can include any nonstandard or unpleasant word or phrase. Vulgar words, or vulgarisms, have been claimed to be the words of the common, uneducated people, but men of every social class, even a President of the United States, might use them. Vulgar words for sex and bathroom topics are called dirty (filthy) words or four-letter words, which are strictly prohibited in formal situations. In order to avoid offensive situations when people have to deal with such tabooed subjects as sex and bathroom topics, they substitute a euphemistic expression for a "bad" or unacceptable one. A euphemism is "used as an alternative to a dispreferred expression, in order to avoid possible loss of face: either one&quot;s own face or, through giving offense, that of the audience, or of some third party." However, euphemism is more a matter of context than it is a property of a word. The processes by which words become slang or euphemisms are the same as those by which other words change their form or meaning or both. Some of these are the employment of metaphor, generalization, specialization, distortion of sounds, etc.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Slang and vulgar words are dangerous for foreign learners of English to use; euphemisms are the safest.