It’s very thematic, which means it’s basically a lexicon of synonyms. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative. It seems to me that slang is always doubting. Slang is primarily concrete, but the one abstract that underpins it is that of doubt. It questions and deals with themes like sex, drugs, violence, rudeness, abuse, racism and so on and so forth. At its heart it’s down, it’s dirty, it’s grubby, it’s tart, it’s essentially subversive.
If you take slang to a linguist they try to define it within the boundaries of what they know as linguists, and very soon they discover they can’t find a specific register into which it falls. Nobody knows the etymology of the word slang.
Slang is difficult because everything about it defies simple classification.
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