Wonky

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sarah from Galveston, Texas.

Well, hi, Sarah. How are you doing?

Good.

Sarah, what’s on your mind today?

I was actually wondering, what makes a word actually slang?

The reason I ask is, it actually comes back to your show,

You always ask the people, the contestants on slangness,

What’s their favorite slang word?

So I was trying to think of mine, and I came up with wonky, which is kind of a synonym to askew.

And I wondered, no wonder if that’s actually a word in the dictionary or if it is slang.

What qualifies a word for slang?

So I found it in the dictionary, and then I thought, well, it could still be slang.

I didn’t know.

So I thought I’d ask you guys.

Yeah, it should be in most dictionaries, at least the older sense, meaning askew or aslant or crooked

Or not quite right, maybe slightly broken.

You hear that more in Britain, don’t you?

Yeah, but I think you’ll find it in most American dictionaries

And probably won’t have a label as far as the region goes.

I know it. I think it’s part of my own language.

But your question about what makes slang,

That gets to the heart of what I do for a living.

Yeah, you’ve come to the right place.

The first thing to say is you’re absolutely right.

Something being in the dictionary doesn’t mean it isn’t slang.

Slang can still be in the dictionary.

Dictionaries are simply a very small snapshot,

Even the largest dictionaries, including the OED of the English language.

There are millions of words that are not in mainstream dictionaries.

Millions.

Of course, most of them are medical words or chemical words

Or technological words, scientific words, but still.

So the dictionary can only ever capture a small part of the language

That most of us use in a given time,

And they’ll often put common slang in there.

That’s fine, and it’s good, and that’s what you use dictionaries for, to find things out.

Sarah, I mean, when you think about wonky, would you call it slang?

To me, it sounds slang.

It doesn’t sound like you would use it in a proper English essay or something.

There we go.

It doesn’t seem as proper.

You’ve plugged into one of the criteria for what makes a word slang,

And it’s the language that people would generally agree should not be used in formal situations or in front of people with a high social status.

I always say the president or the queen.

There are a couple other things.

Slang tends to come from the language of people who don’t have a lot of power, who aren’t ranked socially high.

This is why slang tends to appear in the language of young men or in minority cultures or even in professions where people may be committed to the profession,

But the profession, for whatever reason, doesn’t have a lot of influence on the world or the way that it works.

And you’ll find again and again, you can slot a lot of slang into that category.

There are a few more of these, but one of the other ones that I think is most important to say is that slang,

Although it tends to be disrespectful or inappropriate or even crass, that is not enough alone to make it slang.

I see a lot of people who criticize language that they disagree with or that they feel is incorrect as slang, as if just because they believe it to be wrong, it must automatically be slang.

And that’s simply a fallacy. That simply is not true.

Carl Sandburg said that slang is a language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and gets to work.

Right, right. The one I like best is I used to quote John Updike, and he wrote this before quite a while back.

He described it as a protest against the king’s English.

So it’s a way of saying, I recognize that there’s a more formal language

Or a more proper language to use in this situation than others,

But I am choosing to make a point by using other language

That maybe has different connotations or maybe you don’t know.

So it’s rebellious then.

It is a little rebellious.

I don’t really see wonky as rebellious.

But it doesn’t have to be all of these things at once.

I don’t know. It’s a fun word to say.

It’s more picturesque than

Askew in my mind. I see

Wonky, you know?

You know, like I have a picture of a chair that’s

Sort of leaning over and the

Legs are leaning, you know, like

All the screws aren’t in there.

I don’t know. To me it was a silly word that I

Had never heard before.

I like it. A wonky chair or a squeegee

Jawed chair.

Or a catawampus.

Well, Sarah, I know there was a whole brainful that I dumped

There, but hopefully it makes some sense of it.

No, thank you very much.

You’re welcome. We’re glad to take your call. Good luck down there in Galveston.

Thanks.

Okay, thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

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