Talk the Talk: Using Slang and Lingo to Build a World
2 November 2026 · 2 min read
The fastest way to drop an audience into an unfamiliar world is to let your characters speak its language. Not explain it. Speak it. The audience catches up as they go, and the catching up is half the fun.
Some of this slang is real. Some of it is made up by the writer. Most of it, I suspect, is a bit of both. It doesn't matter. What matters is that it sounds like it belongs.
A few favorites
The Sting is one of the best movies ever made. The first time we meet Paul Newman's Henry Gondorff, he is telling a story about a senator who is about to be conned, and the speech is packed with the words of the era. We don't need a glossary. We get that this man is the real thing, and we love him for the rest of the picture.
Clueless did the same thing with teenage talk. Whether real kids spoke like Cher in 1995 is beside the point. Audiences believed they did, and plenty of them started.
A Clockwork Orange goes further. Alex's slang carries the violence of the story. The words themselves are part of the imagery.
Ocean's Eleven is one of my all-time favorites for this. As Danny and Rusty put the team together, every man is named by the job he does. The lingo of the heist IS the recruitment scene.
When somebody needs it explained
Sometimes a character is an outsider, and you want to show how far they have worked their way in. Sometimes you just need one scene that tells the audience how the language works. Donnie Brasco does both at once with the "forget about it" scene. Johnny Depp explains the phrase to a couple of FBI technicians, and by the end we know what it means, all the different things it means, and how deep he has gone.
So, in your story: what do the people in this world call things? What do they call each other? What word would an outsider get wrong? Find those and put them in your characters' mouths. Let them talk the talk while they walk the walk.
I hope your scripts are all totally fetch. Wrong movie. I know.
The scenes from The Sting, Ocean's Eleven and Donnie Brasco are in the video above.
Watch it