The nature of slang and HDAS

[Geoff Nathan]

At 09:53 AM 6/20/2003 -0400, Frank Abate wrote:
>still hold out, saying that slang is fundamentally and essentially oral --
>in its **origin**.  Please reply if you can show that this is not the case.

IMHO there is now **written** slang.  I'm not sure what other category we
could put things like what you see at the beginning of this sentence, not
to mention things like

cu, l8r, ymmv

and all the stuff used in Instant Messaging.  (I note, incidentally, that
Eudora 5.2 did not flag the first two items above (i.e. the spell-checker
didn't underline them), which, I suppose, counts against my claim that this
stuff is slang.  AFAIK linguists haven't classified this stuff yet (but I
may be wrong--I'm a newbie on this list).

Geoff