I was having difficulties writing about slang until I found this on break.com. Now I just have to write and everything is translated for me. In all seriousness, last night I was listening to the Radio West program that was sent out in the the E-Mail, and was interested to learn about how the jump rope songs that children sing have been found all over the world. It made me think back to when I was growing up and had traveled to another state to visit my cousins. During the visit I remember being surprised that they also played the "Slug Bug" game where the first person to see a VW bug hit the person next to them. Being from a small town in Colorado I remember how cool it was that my big city cousins played the same game that we played at home. Although, that story is less then interesting to most of you it illustrates what Dalzell said about how slang gives a sense of commonality. On the other hand I can see how if a persons definition of a slang term differed from another's then this could create a sense of not belonging to "the" group. In the end I don't think that there is any way to separate slang from English