slanguage

A combination of the words slang and language, to describe terms where the distinction between grammatical correctness and common usage has become somewhat blurred. AFAIK first used by Rick Jolly in the title of his book Jackspeak: the Pusser's Rum guide to Royal Navy slanguage.

The Jargon File is an example of a lexicon of slanguage. Listening to any conversation between two or more geeks, it is apparent that (usually) good grammar is enhanced (or spoiled, depending on your point of view) by:

• the interspersion of technical terminology (core, root, firewall);
• many words that aren't actually words (luser, foo, jaggies);
• many words that are used out of their 'usual' context (flame, jiffy, daemon); and
• occasionally, obscure grammatical structures (VAXen, boxen, the -P convention).

The language spoken by hackers is not anarchic. It follows its own set of rules and could be considered a sublanguage of English as a whole. (Insert your own lingua franca here.) Its psychological usage as a method of distinguishing in-group and out-group will not be discussed here, but it is evident that the saturation of the language with slang has altered the language in some way: hence, the result is a slanguage.