Les pérégrinations du mot slam Du slam américain au slam français

Founded in Chicago during the early 1980s, slam is an open-form competition of performance poetry that has enjoyed considerable success around the world. Its origins are, however, often left unexplored, starting with the very choice of the word that came to designate this format. The lexeme slam, in American English, brings with it a vast semantic field, able to bring to light for us different features of the slam movement itself, pushing lexical borders that are all the more in flux considering how young the phenomenon still is. Our purpose, then, is to explore the multiple connotations attached to this word, before proceeding to examine the fashion in which it has been integrated in to the French vocabulary, serving above all as a gateway into new forms of creativity. It appears in fact that the introduction of this word has opened up in French a space for the production of numerous puns and neologisms, which we will illustrate with a number of examples, each founded upon diverse lexicographic matrices.