3:00 p.m.

One of my favorite books is entitled Word Play: What Happens When People Talk. It's not actually a novel, but a course book from one of my high school advanced English classes. It deals with the intricacies of human language, and is written in such a way as to be incredibly amusing and insanely informative all at once. It's one of those books that you read for fun and after you're done realize that you've actually learned something.

I've been skimming through it, and I have a paragraph I'd like to share, not for the funny, but more the interesting:

Most slang words are heard for a few years and then disappear, usually forever. Some are fated to endure solely as slang without ever being admitted to polite usage, such as bones (in the meaning of "dice"), which was first used by Chaucer, and beat it, used by Shakespeare. But occasionally some slang words -- like joke, fad, boom, crank, and slump -- become respectable items in the vocabulary. The Standard German word for "head," Kopf, was once slang, and so also with the French word with the same meaning, "tete", derived from the Latin testa, "earthen pot."

From Word Play, page 78, by Peter Farb.