BOOKS: Substandard-Bearer

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What kind of cockamamie lingo is slang anyway? Samuel Johnson railed against it, complaining about the corrupting influence on the English language of what in his day was called cant. Daniel Defoe hated it. Noah Webster, in his 1828 American Dictionary, defined slang as "low, vulgar, unmeaning." And in all the years since, legions of teachers have tried to eradicate it.

Well, forget about it, Bubby. Slang may be substandard, the stepsister of Standard English, but it has enlivened the language for centuries. It is so deeply embedded in the daily life of Americans that no amount of bad-mouthing or mouthwashing by box-headed double-domes, drelbs, brainos and chuckleheads can give it the bum's rush. Though it does not belong in "correct" literary or conventional usage, except when employed for effect, it is wonderfully expressive and endlessly inventive.

It was an appreciation of slang's pungency that led Jonathan E. Lighter to begin collecting examples of street talk as a teenager. Now 45 and a research associate in the English department of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Lighter has launched the first of a planned three-volume Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang ($50), 1,080 pages teeming with more than 20,000 entries and etymologies, along with an illuminating survey. Volume I runs from a (as in a pig's a) through g (as in gytch, v., to steal); the second installment is due in 1996, the third in 1997 (although this sort of timetable tends to be iffy).

Lighter observes that distinctions between "good" and "bad" English were virtually nonexistent before the mid-17th century, when the first dictionaries were issued. Words and phrases that are today considered vulgar expressions for bodily and sexual functions were once common currency among men and women of all classes. The King James version of the Bible referred in Leviticus to "stones" (for testicles); the Second Book of Kings used the common four- letter word for urine. Chaucer deployed 200 separate oaths in Canterbury Tales. And did anybody give a fiddler's intercourse about the proprieties? Dreck no! There weren't any proprieties. Everybody was vulgar; so nobody was vulgar.

It was with the onset of the English Restoration in 1660, when public literacy began to flower, that notions about the language started to change. The criminal classes and otherwise illiterate people evolved their own argot to serve as both a private code and a subversive nose-thumbing at the Establishment, and it was to guard against this verbal pollution that writers and critics like Johnson tried to formulate proscriptions aimed at purifying "the King's English."

It didn't work, and slang has gone garbonzo ever since. In the U.S. alone, thousands of vivid new words -- from the rude to the crude to the lewd -- have slipped into (some would say assaulted) the language. Most of the new vocabulary has come fromdiscrete groups for whom a special jargon affords status and protection: students (barf), blacks (jazz, originally to copulate), the military (blow it out your barracks bag), alcohol user (crocked), drug user (crackhead) and the underworld (grifter).