• slangwhanger •
Printable Version Pronunciation: slæng-whæng-gêr • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: (Slang—are you surprised?) A loud, abusive speaker or writer.
Notes: Today's Good Word is one I stumbled across in the Oxford English Dictionary. There is no question of its origin; it is another comical gift of the US frontier. Its absence from US dictionaries indicates that it has faded from our collective memory just when we need it the most. What do slangwhangers do? Why slangwhang, of course, since they define themselves by their slangwhang.
In Play: Slangwhangers are vituperative people who take delight in affronting the people they dislike: "I love to listen to the slangwhangers who call in to C-SPAN to express their political views." Slangwhangers generally turn every issue into a political one: "The town meeting to discuss the placement of the new school water fountains was disrupted by slangwhangers, who apparently didn't drink anything as soft as water themselves."
Word History: Although today's Good Word sounds like a nonsense word, it does have a history. It is, just as it appears to be, a compound made up of slang and whang. Slang, of course, has always referred to substandard or 'low' speech. It originally referred to the speech of disreputable characters. Whang goes back to Old English thwong, which split into thong and whang somewhere between Old and Modern English. Thong originally meant a lash and this meaning continued in whang "to lash with a thong" in Scotland, a major source of early US settlers. So the original meaning of today's Good and silly Word was "someone who lashes out with vulgar speech"—pretty much what it means today.
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