Antonio Lillo

Covert Puns as a Source of Slang Words in English

If language is ‘‘the dress of thought’’, as Dr Samuel Johnson put it, then slang could well be described as fancy dress at its most flamboyant. There is indeed no other area of language where words are disguised under distorted forms, as in ossifer (from officer) ‘‘a police officer’’, mockingly reshaped through metanalysis, as in give the Spanish archer (from *give the El Bow 5give the elbow), or hidden under the false front of rhyme, as in Calvin (Kline) ‘‘wine’’. Slang is the one domain of the lexicon where the speaker, freed from the restraining influence of the standard, plays around with all the potentialities of word-formation, thereby embuing communication with creative zest and a sense of humour. Only very rarely does it yield new forms, for more often than not the creativity of slang lies precisely in the attachment of new meanings to old lexical materials, in some cases in simple, predictable ways, in others through elaborate plays on words—witness the wildly bizarre sex on a riverbank ‘‘weak beer’’, playing off ‘‘fucking close to water’’. The wealth of homophones in English also provides a rich resource for what I term ‘‘cut-down puns’’, as when Frank is used in the sense ‘‘zapper’’ (i.e., a TV remote control, from the American rock star Frank Zappa) or Savalas in the sense ‘‘telly’’ (after the Kojak star Telly Savalas). As shown in a previous study, the puns formed in this way are, if not exactly two a penny, far from unusual in contemporary slang, with varying degrees of iconicity in the dropped element which help enhance their light-heartedness. Sometimes, though, the formation of puns based on homophony depends not on development from an iconic word which is removed, but on a whole network of linguistic (both phonological and semantic) and often also extralinguistic associations. A particularly striking example is the British slangism Bruce for an ‘‘ounce of a drug’’. No doubt an arcane coinage to the uninitiated, the pun hinges on the homophones Oz ‘‘Australia’’ and oz ‘‘an ounce of a drug’’, but also on the widely held belief that Bruce is the most popular male name down under. As a cultural side-note,