Buckaroo and megabuck, glitz and glam, tightwad and uptight – all are slang. Since the days of the fast clippers, thousands of similar idioms have raced from home shores to be recognized everywhere as particularly “American slang.” Thanks partly to the telegraphers of the Atlantic cable, the laconic OK (1839 OED) had reached England by 1866 and turned up as “an Americanism” in a subsequent edition of Hotten's British slang dictionary (OED; Hotten 1874); in the twentieth century it became probably the most widely recognized Americanism on earth. The common noun guy took two or three generations to overhaul the earlier bloke in Britain, Australia, and elsewhere, but the American term (ultimately traceable to the name of Guy Fawkes) is now familiar wherever English is spoken. American slang has circled and recircled the globe.

In spite of its worldwide influence, the significance of American slang has been long slighted. Except for Richard Bailey (1996), Gerald Cohen, Connie Eble, and Karl Sornig, trained linguists have rarely given slang more than a quick hello. Indeed, the word slang itself may be on the decline as a term of art; the four heavy volumes of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Bright), for instance, do not offer an article on the subject and mention slang in passing only. Yet the increasing perspicuity of critical thought about language is what resulted in the recognition of slang in the first place, and slang's rise to prominence is a salient fact in the history of American English.