The exploitation of slang: a critical study on U.S. monthly magazines

This study aims at opening a critical discussion about a topic that needs to be tackled in linguistic research concerning English slang, i.e. the strategic use of slang in the mass media. So far, the literature available on this lexical category has privileged lexicography (e.g. slang etymology, dictionary compilations) and the study of in-group slang (e.g. the slang of the underworld, the slang of college students). Indeed, as consumers of mass culture, we daily witness a pervasive use of slang in the media – so blatant a stylistic choice that it can only be explained as a form of language manipulation. This empirical observation triggers three questions: a) why is slang considered as an effective lexical choice by text producers? b) how is it used? c) what is the outcome of such choice? Chapter One presents the media’s appropriation of slang and explains why the field of analysis has been restricted to American English on the one hand, and to monthly magazines on the other. Chapter Two is devoted to building a theoretical framework that allows for a critical understanding of the social, cultural and economical powers that generate the media’s need to devise persuasive and manipulative language strategies. Chapter Three attempts an overview of the reasons why slang has a privileged grip on the audience, due both to its ‘unsanitized’ socio-psychological potential and to its age-long stigmatization by cultural institutions (dictionaries, the Academy) – a status that has conveyed a defiant and daring attitude to its users. After discussing the appropriation of slang from a theoretical and socio-cultural point of view, a textual and discoursal study is offered on a corpus consisting of the 2007 issues of six monthly magazines published in the United States of America, namely Cosmopolitan, Glamour, GQ, Esquire, Popular Mechanics and Wired. Chapter Four provides the methodological criteria for corpus selection and analysis. Following the guidelines of Critical Discourse Analysis, an adaptation is made of Fairclough’s (2001) stages of analysis, namely description, interpretation, and explanation, in order to suit the needs of a study of written material devised and distributed for a large audience. Chapters Five and Six offer a qualitative analysis of the use of slang in monthly magazines. The first step is the analysis of covers because it opens a door on editorial strategies at their most overt. Covers play a chief role in the purchase event, whereas the interior is devised to be read when the magazine already belongs to the reader who has bought, borrowed or found it. Therefore, the visual and textual packaging of a magazine issue condenses all the main assumptions made by the editors about the target readers’ features, needs and expectations; it also essentializes the magazine’s self-representation as an advisor/entertainer/informer to the advantage of the reader (Swann, 1991; Click & Baird, 1990; Morrish, 1996). Then, the analysis shifts to the stories previewed on the covers, in order to verify whether the effectiveness of slang is limited to its role as a purchasers’ catcher on cover headlines or it stretches out to the related stories. It has been observed that slang is an effective tool in the hands of the media because of its emotional content: by triggering in-group memories and a sense of collective identity, slang manages to modify the readers’ emotional state and make them more open and receptive to the overt and covert messages offered by the magazine. Chapter Seven provides concluding remarks. Slang is exploited by magazines, not simply used or borrowed: the vocabulary created by powerless groups, i.e. youngsters and minorities, is appropriated by the media, overused to the point that it loses most of its creative and communicative punch, and finally redirected towards its creators in order to gain their trust and turn them into more controllable and more predictable consumers.