The Distastefulness of Slang

It seems a thing to be expected that, as life goes on, humans face new realities, and situations that make them reckon with old realities they may not have noticed before, or look at those old realities in new ways--and that they will come up with terms to go with those new or new-old realities, situations, states of being, etc.. Some of these terms may be coinages by intellectuals engaged in scientific, academic, philosophical inquiry, but many are likely to emerge from the bottom-up, in the colloquial usages of persons who have no formal standing of that kind--in a word, slang.

Still, there is something very off-putting to many about a great deal of slang, with this arguably extending beyond the distaste of the old and stuffy for the new, or the annoyance of those who are not "with it" at constantly being bewildered by such neologisms.

Why is that?

One explanation may be that of the colloquialisms that people come up with, and even those colloquialisms that come into wide use, a very high proportion are unsatisfactory for whatever reason, perhaps not actually conveying very much, or becoming irritating in a hurry. Certainly this would seem to account for how much slang proves ephemeral, the usage seemingly everywhere for a while and then disappearing such that it afterward only appears as a retro or ironic phenomenon. (I certainly don't miss the '90s tendency to make a false statement and then add "NOT!" at the end.)

Another I can think of would have to do with what many find the repellent quality of slang in our particular day. One possibility is that slang reflects an era, and that an illiterate, intellectually stultified, mean, crass, crude era of backsliding and backwardness and barbarism, of sadism and stupidity and self-satisfied poshlost regarding the whole thing--such as naturally goes with the worship of personal power and its brutal exercise so emblematic of our time--will produce slang to match, reflected in, among much else, the extreme disrespect which has become our default mode of dealing with each other, with every use of "Whatever!" as a dismissive one-word sentence reminding us, and making those who have any intelligence or sensitivity left in them shrink in disgust. Meanwhile those of us who can understand the meaning of such things may remember what Captain Kirk had to say about the use of language in 1986--since which year things have gone far, far worse for those struggling for cultured speech.