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Slanguage skills
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Slanguage skills
  If you read my earlier column about text messaging, you know that the abbreviated English adopted by the texting crowd does not make me LOL. The code is too simple to be intriguing, and was born merely of the desire to save money and time, rather than a desire to express thoughts in a new way. In fact, it severely limits its users, who must speak in pre-approved code strings to be understood. Everyone saying the same thing in the same way—it’s the stuff nightmares are made of.  Slang, now—that’s intriguing. It’s constantly changing, evolving to meet the needs of people who want or need their own descriptive words, in order to set themselves apart from other generations, social groups, or work groups. There’s professional slang—not slang that’s more polished than other slang, but slang used by workers in certain fields. Newspaper employees have a huge slang vocabulary; so do police officers and fire fighters. Covering the police beat in Houston, I learned them all, but they weren’t interchangeable because few of those in the other groups were “bislangual”—speaking police to a fire fighter is like speaking English to a German.  There’s computer slang, sports slang, urban slang, gangsta slang, surfer slang, drug slang, prison slang. Years before, the various slanguages would have stayed pretty much where they were born. Now, thanks to television and the Internet, slang spreads far and quickly. We’re all free to embrace or reject the latest cutting-edge slang terms from worlds we may never have heard of.  I grew up in the age of groovy, right on, and far out. I knew people who said “right on,” and “far out” and others who liked to say “right arm” and “farm out,” to poke fun at the ones who said “right on” and “far out.” I honestly, genuinely have never heard anyone use the word “groovy” unless they were joking. It was used by characters on television shows, and maybe it caught on in other places, but it never did in my circle. I guess it was the mid-seventies when surfer slang entered the mainstream: Tubular and radical sort of came and went but, to steal unashamedly from “The Big Lebowski,” “dude” abides. I use “dude.” Most of the people I know use it from time to time. It’s such a versatile term, whole conversations can be made from it, as illustrated in a scene from the movie “Dude, Where’s My Car?” “Dude” has replaced “man” as the cornerstone of modern slang, although I still use “man” now and then, as in, “Aw, man.”  Remember The Fly Girls? That was the female dance troupe on the television show “In Living Color” in the early nineties. Jennifer Lopez got her start there. The word “fly” had become popular, and I thought the term was relatively new at the time—I’d never heard it before 1988 or so. Then I heard Cab Calloway sing, “Are You Hep to the Jive?” in which he also asks, “Do you lace your boots high? Are you fly, are you fly?” Not a new slang term at all, since that song was recorded in 1939. So I looked it up, and discovered it was actually old slang when Cab sang it—it originated somewhere between 1805 and 1815, and was British, as opposed to “hep,” which was born in America about a hundred years later, and has since evolved into “hip” for reasons unknown to me.  When I was in junior high school, the word “tough” became a popular way to describe a person who was cute, an activity that was fun, or a song that was liked. We spelled it “tuff.” I used that a few times in clandestine notes passed during algebra, but I never spoke it that I can recall. Its usage was brief—I’m sure some other word was commandeered the next school year to replace it, but I can’t recall that, either. Appropriating words that mean bad, hard or unpleasant, and using them to mean good, easy or enjoyable, is a common theme in the world of teen slang. Witness the slang terms “phat, “sick,” “nasty,” and “dope.” It’s a form of rebellion.  These slang terms also serve as a crutch for tired sitcom writers, who can always throw in a scene where a “square” reacts badly to being called phat, sick, or nasty. MAD TV did a sketch in which a shadowy organization met to discuss promotion of new slang, and decided “bomb” (as in “da bomb”) should be replaced with “ebola,” as in, “girl those shoes are ebola.” I’m kind of surprised it didn’t catch on—it has all the earmarks of good slang. Groovy, hip, tuff, phat, sick, nasty, dope or da bomb: Pick one you like, or use them all. They all mean the same thing, you know. Cool.  |
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