Trends in the use of slang in the panel show Just A Minute in the period 1967-2006

This article is based on an analysis of a corpus of transcripts published on the internet (over 3 million words) of the popular radio/ television panel game “Just A Minute” over the period 1967-2006. The initial procedure was to search for the 5000+ headwords listed in the The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (Ayto and Sinpson 2005), mapping the relative frequencies of the terms. From this data, it is possible to observe the occurrence of certain categories of words (e.g. origin, first recorded use in writing, etc) and make some general observations (some of which inevitably cast doubt on the accuracy or appropriateness of some aspects of the dictionary and raise general questions about other areas relating to the complex and problematic concept of slang). The corpus, documenting a speech event whose tone is light-hearted and humorous provides fertile ground to look at slang and non-standard forms in general: two areas for which historical linguists often find data difficult to come by (see Culpeper and Kytö 1999; Moore 1999). The term slang does not define an objectively identifiable set of items. This makes research related to it challenging as does the fact that much of it is only transitory. Consequently, looking at separate items of slang misses the bigger picture and fails to identify more general trends. By looking at more general categories within slang, we do uncover overall trends. Clear patterns for the frequency of slang terms since 1751 onwards can be observed. These are shown to subject to the socio-geographical association of individual terms, with for example, “local” terms associated with Great Britain showing different patterns to those from the USA. The year of birth and sex of the speaker also prove to be significant: both individual items of slang and subclasses of slang (e.g. ‘vulgar’) being used proportionately more by certain types of speaker than others.