Slang is born in the margins. In its early form, the word itself, slang, referred to a narrow strip of land between larger properties. During England’s transition from the rigid castes of feudalism to the competitive free market of capitalism, across the 14th to 17th centuries, the privatization of open farmland displaced countless people without inherited connection to the landed elite. This shift pushed people into small corridors between the recently bounded properties. Confined to the literal fringes of society, they needed to get creative to survive. Some became performers and hucksters, craftspeople and con artists, drifters and thieves. They lived in makeshift homes, often roaming in groups along their slim municipal strip. This was the slang: the land on the outskirts of early English ownership and, by association, its counterculture. The slang had its own rules, its own politics, its own dialect. Roving bands needed a way to speak surreptitiously in the presence of law enforcement, a rival group, or a mark. So over time they developed a secret, colorful, and ephemeral cant. Across …