Slang: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathon Green

Author:Jonathon Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198729532
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

Prison

The closed world of prison presents a perfect seedbed for the germination of slang. Life is tightly prescribed, there are hierarchies—whether established by officialdom or laid down among the inmates themselves—there is a predictable round of officially circumscribed existence. One may fight the authorities, but one remains in prison. Until one’s sentence has been served out (or less frequently in the case of escape) there is nowhere else to go.

Each prison has its own linguistic specialities, often based, as are those of schools and colleges, on specific local references: the name of the prison itself, its buildings, the prison officers, the dinner menu, the internal logistics, such as illicit communication or the smuggling of commodities and those who facilitate such activities, the characteristics, admirable or otherwise, of given types of prisoner. In those countries which maintain it, there is a whole micro-lexis pertaining to the death penalty: the wing that holds the condemned, the room in which it is performed, the means of execution. It is perhaps a subconscious response to this hermetic world that the one group who appear to be overlooked are those who arrive from the free world, the visitors.

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