slash

In ice hockey, slashing is a named infraction: swinging the stick at an opponent, usually across the arms, hands or legs. It is called as a minor or a major penalty depending on the force used and any injury, so players draw a slashing call or sit out for slashing. Keep it apart from the sports noun, which names a legal swing at the ball.

Sport keeps the sword's wide arc but swaps the blade for a bat or stick. The usual construction is take a slash at the ball, and the word is often qualified as wild, because it suggests power more than control. That same judgment is built into the cricket verb, where slashing means swinging without discipline.

Old and new tailoring meet in this verb. Renaissance tailors slashed doublets so a bright lining would show through. Modern designers slash a hem or a knee for a frayed, distressed look, with no lining meant to appear. The past participle does much of the work: slashed sleeves, a slashed hem.

Decoration by deliberate damage. The slit is cut so that a lining or undergarment of a contrasting color shows, or is pulled, through it, a hallmark of Tudor and Renaissance dress. Garments treated this way are described as slashed, and the cutting itself is the work of the matching verb.

A fandom term that borrows its name from the slash mark, the stroke joining a pairing's names, as in Kirk/Spock. Inside fan communities it works as a content label. Katherine Arcement, in the London Review of Books in 2013, describes readers warned "in large block letters" of slash, which she takes to mean any sex between two men or two women. Outside fandom it usually needs explaining, and the same word serves as the verb for writing it.

Calling the backslash ⟨\⟩ simply a slash is common, but it is often frowned on, especially where the difference matters. A web address uses the forward mark, while a Windows path uses the backward one. When precision counts, say forward slash or backslash. Used plainly, slash should mean the forward-leaning mark.

A cricket commentator's word with a verdict built in. To slash is to swing hard with little control, usually at a ball outside off stump. The batter risks an edge to the slips for the chance of quick runs. It nearly always takes at, as in he slashed at a wide one. Other bat and stick games use the noun for a wide swing.

A verb formed directly from the fan-fiction genre and used intransitively. Fans slash, or slash in a particular fandom, rather than slashing a particular story. Its agent noun is slasher. Ruth Gifford, writing in 1997, compares the work of “slashers who slash” across X-Files, Sentinel and Trek.

A North American woodsman's word that keeps its violence: the clearing is torn open by logging or fire, not left by nature. Compounds can name the cause. Henry Van Dyke skirts “a fire slash” in Little Rivers (1895). The same ground, strewn with branches, gives the debris left after felling, so context decides whether slash means the place or what lies on it.

Here slash is a mass noun. Loggers speak of slash and piles of slash, never a slash. It means the limbs, tops and bark left behind by felling and bucking. Because dry slash feeds fires, it is managed by piling, burning or chipping. The countable forest clearing names the place; this sense names what lies on it.

Best known from the compound slash-and-burn, the farming method of cutting vegetation and burning it to open ground for crops. In North American forestry, the verb covers clearing by logging or brushfire. Using it for clearing land by grazing is an uncommon agricultural extension. The cleared ground that results is the forest clearing.

Coarse slang built on the image of a cleft or cut, the same picture behind the word's marks and incisions. It belongs strictly to crude talk and graffiti and will offend in almost any other setting. Where the body part must be named, the anatomical word is vulva.

A British vulgarism with a history separate from the cutting word. It is probably linked to Scots slash, “a large splash,” and the urinating sense appears in the 1950s. It lives in set phrases such as take a slash, have a slash and need a slash. It is coarse enough to keep among friends. The neutral words are pee and urinate.

As a verb it is intransitive: you slash somewhere, never slash something. Martin Amis puts it in a deliberately crude line in The Rachel Papers (1973). Take care in writing, because the cutting verb shares the spelling. “Slashed the bed” and “slashed in the bed” describe very different offenses.

A field botanist's or forester's cut, made on purpose rather than in violence. The deep, tapering incision goes into a stem or bark to tap resin or latex, or to expose the inner bark, whose color and texture help identify the tree. Unlike the laceration, it is a tool of inspection, not an injury.

A third slash, unrelated to cutting. It is probably kin to British dialect slashy, “wet and dirty,” and Scots slatch, “a muddy place,” and perhaps to Swedish slask, “slush.” Colonial Virginia land records from 1687 to 1714 use it to mark boundaries, often doubling it for clarity: “a great Slash or Swamp,” “a Slash or Sunken ground.”

The tree takes its name from its ground, the swampy lowland. Using slash alone for the pine is uncommon, though forms like long-leaf yellow slash appear. Its other names include yellow slash, swamp pine, hill slash and Cuban pine. In most writing, use the full name slash pine so the word is not read as forest debris.

A sound word in the family of bang and whoosh. It stands outside the sentence rather than modifying anything in it, usually set off by an exclamation mark or dashes, as in cartoons and action narration. It cannot be compared, so there is no “more slash.” It may also echo the possibly imitative origin of the cutting stroke.