Green’s Dictionary of Slang

slacker n.

[SE slack]

1. one who shirks work or avoids exertion etc.

[UK]Daily Tel. 14 Aug. in Ware (1909) 122/2: Every man after lunch devotes himself to ‘eccer’, which is, in ordinary parlance, exercise. This may take the shape of ‘footer’, or a mild constitutional known as a ‘constituter’, while if any one lounges idly about he is, of course, a ‘slacker’.
[UK]Magnet 29 Feb. 3: ‘Cad!’ ‘Slacker!’ ‘Rotter!’.
[UK]A. Brazil Fourth Form Friendship 17: ‘I’ve often heard you say yourself that if one is to get on at school one must do well at games.’ ‘No one tolerates slackers, certainly I’ll allow that’.
[UK]‘Bartimeus’ ‘The Argonauts’ in Naval Occasions 37: What about a song, you slacker! Something with a chorus.
[US]Seattle Star (WA) 7 June 10/3: Oh! Woody! Pay Up your Taxes! [...] Discovery has been made that President Wilson is a slacker — a tax slacker.
[US]E. Booth Stealing Through Life 239: But I was a slacker; I was a deserter.
[US](con. 1917–19) Dos Passos Nineteen Nineteen in USA (1966) 467: The crowd [...] yelled ‘Slackers’ at them and the girls hissed and booed.
[Aus]K. Tennant Foveaux 95: There are too many slackers and rotters leaning against lamp-posts while the boys in the trenches are crying out in vain for reinforcements.
[UK]Whizzbang Comics 76: And that bunch of stuffed scarecrows at the house taking you for a mug or a slacker!
[US]B. Schulberg Harder They Fall (1971) 181: Carpentier the war hero versus Dempsey the slacker.
[UK]A. Buckeridge Jennings Goes To School 58: Venables, you dirty slacker, you haven’t washed your feet!
[US]H.S. Thompson letter 17 Jan. in Proud Highway (1997) 101: A slacker’s credo for pleasure.
[UK]P. Barnes Ruling Class Prologue: The Gurneys have never been slackers.
[US]L. Heinemann Close Quarters (1987) 155: You two slackers are in plenty, plenty trouble.
[US]H. Rawson Dict. of Invective (1991) 358: slacker. One who shirks work or evades other obligations, especially during time of war.
[UK]Guardian G2 20 Jan. 14: A US site dedicated to ‘slackers, goof-offs, procrastinators, loafers, long lunchers and web-addicted employees world wide.’.
[US]W. Kramer Hard Stuff 195: [W]e were slave labor for the man. It was our criminal duty to avoid accomplishing anything of value. We were committed slackers.

2. (orig. US) a member of the generation in their 20s (c.1995) who, for whatever reason, perhaps cynicism or indolence, sees no point in joining the social mainstream; also attrib.

[US]Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) 29 Aug. C5: Here was the full range of Austin lifestyles – old hippies, [...] middle-age black professionals, underachieving writers and musicians known around town as ‘slackers’, [etc.].
[UK]Guardian Media 6 Sept. 8: The latest thing is the ‘slackcom’ – the sitcom for the slacker generation.
[UK]Indep. on Sun. Culture 13 June 8: The height of their ambition is to be nothing more than grungey slackers.
[US]C. Cook Robbers (2001) 3: Austin, state capital, university town. Former counterculture magnet and slacker haven.