#Ychafi

This week I’ve been looking at slang. Along the way I’ve discovered the bizarre exclamation ‘ach-y-fi’, learned what an 'acca' is and had my deep suspicions of all Australians confirmed by finding out that Erol Flynn was a regular correspondent for a racist newspaper column. Most of all I've been considering what a strange beast slang is. Of all the types of language there are, it’s the one people get the biggest kick out of using and that means the most, emotionally, to them. Of all the types of language there are, it’s the one people are least interested in looking up in a dictionary.

This situation is heartache to a dictionary editor.

The 16th century is generally cited as the first time slang was consciously addressed with the emergence of 'thieves' cant'. This was a collection of slang words used by ‘thieves’ to disguise what they were saying. Highbrowed men of letters liked to write short plays or stories using this jargon and compiled dictionaries of the terms to help their elite readers understand. This early way of defining slang, as a word known only to a certain group, has persisted. There are other types of slang: colloquialisms and words well outside standard English like ‘fuck’ or ‘getting your hole’. But the slangiest slang remains the words used only by a specific group. Everyone has words like this in their personal lexicon, whether they learn them from friends, in the playground, at work, through a hobby or because they live in a certain area. Knowing these words makes you an insider, a sharer of secret knowledge. Anyone who doesn't know them is outside, not part of the subset of society that is yours. These words are part of what makes you you.

It is not surprising, therefore, that although slang is a very significant type of language it is also something that people are not really interested in looking up in a dictionary (sales figures for slang dictionaries prove this). The whole point of slang is it's learned naturally, a result of your life experience. Being able to learn it by reading a dictionary is cheating. It's the kind of thing that leads to politicians thinking they can be down with the kids. As when Nick Clegg announced on local radio: 'Wagwan, fam? Me n my lib dem crew is for real, innit blud. Weez got our earz to the street, believe. Dench.'

The internet isn't going to change either of these things, but it will accentuate both and make the dictionary writer’s agony all the more acute.

Begin by considering the lexicographer’s existence before the world wide web was spun. Yes, they knew that slang was going on all around them and that in many ways it was the beating heart of the language. But it was to all intents and purposes a purely verbal language, rarely written down for anything other than dramatic effect. Since it did not appear in published print it was so difficult to collect that it was best left alone.

The social media explosion is changing all that. On platforms like Facebook or Twitter people are using the written word in a way they never have done before. They are chatting to each other in it. In the past there have been letters and emails, but these never had the immediacy of reply and people used a fairly formal style. Social media is the first time people have ever shot the shit with their friends in writing. No one, not even the poshest of the posh, shoots the shit in very formal language. As this previously exclusively verbal type of communication shifts onto the internet, more and more slang is appearing in writing. What's more, there is something about the nature of social media tools that encourages people to use slang, more (I sometimes suspect) than they would actually do when talking. There are far less markers to show what social group you belong to in an online profile than in real life. The clothes you wear, where you live, what you sound like, all this is largely lost in an online environment. Slang is the best way you have of marking yourself off from the standard mass Tweeple and showing which niche of society you belong to.

Pause and shed a tear for the dictionary maker’s agony. Suddenly, for the first time ever, slang is blossoming in written examples that can be collected, cited and used. New words are appearing in writing for the first time since God blew kick-off. Just today I found out through Twitter that there is a meaning for ‘acca’ that no major dictionary currently has; accumulator bet. Then there was the Welsh word 'ach-y-fi'. Like all Welsh words this looked like someone had tried to spell out a sneeze. Checking through the major corpuses, I got not one usage example at all. Then I tried Twitter and stumbled across a variant spelling 'ychafi' that was being regularly used in English language texts, often as a hashtag.

The fact is though that this appearance of 'ychafi' in writing reinforces the point that people don't want to look up slang in a dictionary. Ychafi is a word that really marks you off as Welsh and part of that exclusive community that have access to it. That, I imagine, is part of the reason why people want to give it the hashtag treatment and literally turn it into a marker. If its meaning is set down in a dictionary and people from outside the group look it up and start using it, 'ycahfi' will have lost its power. Those proud Welsh people would have to start using a new piece of slang instead, probably something like 'fiaffwoa' or 'llodraffid'. Dictionaries and slang stand at loggerheads and so the wonderful (and incredibly funny) usage examples of strange slang words that are mushrooming on Twitter will probably never make money as a dictionary resource. Which leaves the poor lexicographers wishing the cruel world would stop taunting them.