Daily Inspiration Quote by Anthony Burgess

Slang is the revenge of the powerless: a language that slips past the gatekeepers and rewires the social map in real time. When Burgess credits “the downtrodden” as slang’s chief inventors, he’s not offering a sentimental nod to the working class. He’s pointing to a hard, almost mechanical truth about who needs linguistic innovation most. If official speech is the voice of institutions - school, police, bureaucracy, the BBC - then slang is what forms when you’re pushed to the margins of that authority and still have to signal identity, solidarity, and defiance.

The subtext is that “proper” language is never neutral. It’s a credential, a border checkpoint, a way of sorting who belongs and who gets corrected. Slang flips that script: it’s code, camouflage, and community. It names experiences the approved vocabulary won’t dignify, and it turns stigma into style. Even its speed matters. The downtrodden don’t have the luxury of slow-moving prestige; their realities change fast, and their speech mutates to match.

Burgess, a novelist obsessed with how language shapes morality and control, is also quietly arguing for slang as a creative art form, not a degradation. You can hear the logic behind A Clockwork Orange’s Nadsat: make a reader work through an invented argot and you feel, viscerally, how power works in speech - who gets to be legible, who gets to be feared, and who gets to be heard on their own terms.