slang has always kind of just been like that

I'd just like to bring your attention to one of my favorite internet finds, The Public Domain Review's pdf of J. Redding Ware's 1909 Passing English of the Victorian Era: a Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang, and Phrase.

I've posted in other places about the great old phrases - got the morbs is still my favorite - but there's a lot of things that the author thought were unusual enough to include that are still in common use - barbecue, mixologist, squeejee to kill with kindness, and I don't think we can deny that to catch on has, in fact, caught on.