Word: slangs
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...young, as always, use slang as an instrument to define status, to wave to peers and even to discipline reality. A real jerk may be a nerkey, a combination of nerd and turkey. Is something gnarly? That may be good or bad. But if it is mega-gnarly, that is excellent. One may leave a sorority house at U.C.L.A. to mow a burger. Slang has less ideological content now than it had in the '60s. Still, it sometimes arises, like humor, from apprehension. High school students say, "That English test really nuked me." On the other hand, in black...
...frat-house leer is evident in today's collegiate slang. To get naked means to have a good time, whether or not sex is involved. (That is a new shortened form of the get-drunk-and-get-naked party, which collegians fantasized about 20 years ago.) At Michigan State University, one who is vomiting is driving the bus, a reference to the toilet seat and the wretch's need to hang on to it. Sckacks means ugly. A two-bagger is a girl who requires exactly that to cover her ugliness. Young women, of course, retaliate. At breakfast...
...American slang is fed by many tributaries. Feminists are busy networking-the liberated version of using the old-boy network. Cops, as sardonic with language as criminals are, refer to a gunshot wound in the head as a serious headache. Drug users have their codes, but they seem to have lost some of their glamour. Certain drugs have a fatality about them that cannot be concealed in jaunty language. The comedian Richard Pryor introduced the outer world to freebasing a couple of years ago, and John Belushi died after he speed-balled (mixed heroin and cocaine). Punk language has made...
Television has developed an elaborate jargon that has possibilities as slang. Voiceover, segue, intro and out of sync have been part of the more general language for a long time. Now there is the out-tro, the stand-up spiel at the end of a news reporter's segment. A vividly cynical new item of TV news jargon is bang-bang, meaning the kind of film coverage that TV reporters must have in order to get their reports from El Salvador or the Middle East onto the evening news...
...Black slang may not be quite as strong as it was in the '60s. That may mean either that black slang is less productive than before or that it is more successful at remaining exclusive and secret...