What is a word: Yes.

fun little story: I once visited a lecture called “what is a word?”, and the lecturer started with a quizz presenting… well, pieces of speech and asking whether we would consider it a single word or not. Then they said that barely anyone changes their mind throughout their course, and that the answers would remain pretty much the same at the end 😅 But it was still nice to learn about alllll the theories (there are a lot)

Someone at work (professional office setting) asked me what “no cap” meant…

And before I knew what was happening I was 5 minutes deep talking about shooting guns randomly out windows.

I don’t know why more etymology nerds aren’t interested in slang it’s all the cool shit about language evolving except its happening like 10-100x as fast as formal language evolves.