People have always wanted to be around other people and to learn from them. Cities have long been dynamos of social possibility, foundries of art, music, and fashion. Slang, or, if you prefer, “lexical innovation,” has always started in cities ― an outgrowth of all those different people so frequently exposed to one another. It spreads outward, in a manner not unlike transmissible disease, which itself typically “takes off” in cities. If, as the noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield argued, the way a person talks is a “composite result of what he has heard before,” then language innovation would happen where the most people heard and talked to the most other people. Cities drive taste change because they ____________________, who not surprisingly are often the creative people cities seem to attract. Media, ever more global, ever more far-reaching, spread language faster to more people.

* foundry: 주물 공장 ** lexical: 어휘의