For my final paper I want to write about how slang words can become real words and how this has happened in the past. This is a topic I want to explore because I am interested in seeing what words we use in our language today were once slang words. Was the word “slang” itself a slang word at one point? I could even explore how a real word can slowly morph into a slang word; has this happened in the past? I also want to see which slang words we use today will eventually be in our dictionaries years from now. I also want to explore the process of how this happens, is a slang word slang one day and a real word the next? Slang words are definitely part of our English lexicon, there is no question about it; especially popular words that arose from social media. Sometimes people can use slang words without realizing that they’re slang. But since they are part of our English lexicon and are popular amongst social media, could they be turned into real words and should they be? There are many questions I have that I believe will be answered through my research on this topic. I am still not sure what sources I am going to use or where I am going to get them from. One issue I feel like I’m going to have is that I might get off track. I have so many questions on this topic and I feel like I should pick one and explore it thoroughly instead of trying to answer so many. Although, I feel like if I choose to stick with one question I might be able to talk about it less than I expect. To be completely honest, I am still very unsure on where to start but just writing this blog post has given me some sort of clarification on what I want to do.

Simplex words are words that cannot be broken down any further into smaller units. Some examples of simplex words are farm, walk, talk, buy, eat, and paint. These words are simplex because they only contain one constituent. They can not be broken apart into 2 morphological constituents. Complex words are words that can be broken down into 2 morphological constituents. Examples of this would be farmer, walking, talking, buyer, eating, and painter. Although they may seem like they are the same words as mentioned before they are not. These words now have an affix added to them (-ing and -er). This affix indicates that the word contains 2 constituents. So in words like forbid, forget, forgive, forgo, and forswear there are 2 morphological constituents. Just like an affix adds another constituent to a word, so does a prefix. In this case, the prefix is “for” and the affixes are “bid, get, give, go, and swear.”  This is why I believe that forbid, forget, forgive, forgo, and forswear are complex words. The evidence shows that they have 2 morphological constituents.