[…] what we call “slang” […] is only the excess and the abuse of a tendency which is wholly legitimate, and of the highest value, in the history of speech. It seeks relief from the often oppressive conventionality, even insipidity, of words worn out by the use of persons who have put neither knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem incapable of expressing anything that is real. In the exuberance of mental activity, and the natural delight of language-making, slang is a necessary evil; and there are grades and uses of slang whose charm no one need to be ashamed to feel and confess; it is like reading a narrative in a series of rude but telling pictures, instead of in words.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.112-113