Grammar girl here, today's topic is nothing ages writing faster than slang.

Guest writer Sal Glenn writes,

Slang is made of informal words and phrases that originate in speech and often includes

substitutions for formal words like ride or wheels for a car.

Getting down or coming down, tripping, throwing a spaz, digging it groove and so not into

or so into anything are all slang.

It's the all-night amusement park of language where different subcultures like artists and

street criminals get to play with words and meaning, but nothing ages writing faster than

slang.

In the 1950s, stand-up comedian and jazz shaman Lord Buckley, worried that his nightclub

audiences had missed out on the stories of Mahatma Gandhi, the Marquis de Saad and Abraham

Lincoln, along with many fictional luminaries.

The embrace of the new in music, painting and writing was leaving the classics behind.

So Buckley translated the old into street talk and the slang of hipsters to revitalize

the stories before they were lost.

This is what he did with the Mark Antony speech in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,

act three scene two.

Hipsters, flipsters and finger-popping daddies knock me your lobes.

I came here to lay Caesar out, not to hip you to him.

The bad jazz that a cat blows wells long after he's cut out.

The groovy is often stashed within their frames, so don't put Caesar down.

Clearly, what worked then doesn't work now.

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