“One thing this shows, I think, at its simplest, is that language is no respecter of persons in that it will find birth wherever and whenever it can. There is very often something wonderfully anonymous about the whole process: a pimp can coin a word as lasting as that of a poet, a street hawker as a statesman, a farmer as a scholar, a foul mouth as a Latinist, vulgar as refined, illiterate as schooled. Language leaps out of mouths regardless of class, sex, age, or education: it sees something that needs to be said or saved in a word and it pounces. In the American west it pounced for more than fifty years.”
–Melvyn Bragg. The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003. Quote on page 164.