The Essence of Jargon

A poet, translator, and co-editor (of the letters of her late husband, Situationist Guy Debord) who has written extensively on the etymology and history of European slang, Alice Becker-Ho examines argot as a form of self-defense from the State, a code for people who survived outside the law. “In slang, loan words are above all borrowings of one dangerous class from another; that these loan words, confirmed in different slangs, go back to common sources, themselves blended initially into a sort of melting pot before being redistributed via a host of different routes….”

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