"Yo" As Slang
"Yo" has been used as an exclamation to attract attention since the 15th century, as in the cry, "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883). In the early 20th century "yo" was used in lower middle class British slang as a "declaration of admiration ... to the softer sex by the sterner". From the late 20th century it frequently appeared in hip hop music and became associated with African American Vernacular English and also Afro-Caribbeans.
Former British Government Minister Denis MacShane observed that "Yo, Blair" was the American equivalent of "wotcher, mate" and that metaphorically Bush and Blair had been addressing each other using the French informal tu ("you") (as opposed to the more formal vous).
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Famous quotes containing the word slang:
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)