Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  Political satirist John Clarke explains: ‘Barry is hugely observant but he’s much more creative than your normal observer. So what he’s done is enriched this series of observations by making the story better than he actually heard. So he’s a Shakespeare, he’s added to the language.’

  The comic strip was banned in Australia as, according to Customs and Excise, it ‘relied on indecency for its humour’. Subsequent made-in-Australia feature films based on the book – with Barry ‘Shocker’ Crocker playing the lead – were, however, supported by the Australian government. In fact, the prime minster, Gough Whitlam, made an appearance in the 1974 film Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, where he granted a damehood to McKenzie’s aunt, Edna Everage.

  Barry Humphries and Barry Crocker in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, 1972

  Barry Humphries and a new generation of Australian writers and comics continue to keep the language alive with colourful imagery, but there is a sense that – bit by bit – Australian slang is under threat.

  John Clarke agrees.

  ‘It’s very seldom that someone like Barry Humphries comes along, and I think somebody who can infuse the language with an enormous amount of imaginative metaphor and imagery that people will pick up is pretty unusual. My impressions of young people is that they are using the language of the internet and the social networking sites a lot more, and that language is a kind of shorthand in some respects.’

  It’s a case of Save our Slang, says Kathy Lette.

  ‘The American influence is huge, because all the kids are watching the American programmes. So they’ve suddenly started talking like they’re in the New York ghetto – “see you later, dude” and all that stuff. It’s a real push to protect our slang, because we’ve actually realized that it is something quite precious and colourful and historic.’

  I ♥ Slang

  Thousands of new words are added to the English language every year. No one knows just how many, but according to the word-tracking Global Language Monitor, a new word is created every ninety-eight minutes. It’s an extraordinary thought, especially since whole minority languages are disappearing at a similar breathtaking pace. What’s undoubtedly true is that the influence of television and films, computers and social networking in the last decade has meant the greatest explosion of vocabulary since Shakespeare. Texting, Twitter, blog, memory stick, download, carbon footprint, 24/7 and 9/11, ground zero, bling, chav, credit crunch … there’s a seemingly endless list of words which we use on a daily basis today which simply did not exist a decade or so ago. Our language is evolving and expanding on a global scale like never before.

  The first graphical symbol to enter the Oxford English Dictionary

  New entries to the 2011 online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary include: ♥ to heart – meaning to love (e.g. I ♥ New York) – the first graphical symbol in the OED’s history; cream-crackered – rhyming slang for knackered, i.e. exhausted, lashed for drunk, fnarr fnarr for a lecherous snigger, dot-bomb meaning a failed internet company and couch surfing, ‘the practice of spending the night on other people’s couches in lieu of permanent housing’. Tragic has a new, twenty-first-century meaning: ‘a boring or socially inept person, especially a person who pursues a solitary interest with obsessive dedication’. The new entry wag is defined as an acronym for ‘the wives and girlfriends of any group of men, especially celebrities or sportsmen’, first mentioned in a Sunday Telegraph report in 2002 about the England football team’s partners; according to the OED, ‘Wag is notable for the extremely fast journey from its introductions to the language to its use as usual English vocabulary.’ Muffin top enters the dictionary as ‘a protuberance of flesh about the waistband of a tight pair of trousers’. Although many of the words are computer and social networking jargon, television has influenced our everyday language as well. One TV programme in particular, The Simpsons, has created a raft of popular words and phrases. This hugely popular animated series about a dysfunctional American family has been on air since 1989 and, according to Mark Libermann, director of the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, ‘has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture’s greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions’.

  D’oh, the grunt uttered by Homer Simpson, is the cartoon’s most popular neologism. Doh without the apostrophe entered the OED in 2001 as ‘expressing frustrations at the realisation that things have turned out badly or not as planned or that one has just said or done something foolish’. Meh, meaning ‘whatever’ or ‘boring’, is another Simpsons expression that has become particularly popular in the lexicon of web conversations. The Collins English Dictionary included it in 2008, giving as an example ‘The Canadian election was so meh’; it’s not in the OED – the dictionary’s new words editor says it hasn’t quite yet passed into ‘widespread unselfconscious usage’ – but he’s keeping a ‘meh’ file. Other popular expressions include lupper (a calorie-laden meal in between lunch and supper) and the insult eat my shorts! In one episode the writers included two nonsense words, embiggen – to enlarge – and cromulent, meaning fine. ‘He’s embiggened that role with his cromulent performance,’ says Principal Skinner. Both words were so convincing that cromulent has been included in various slang dictionaries and embiggen was used in a scientific paper on string theory: ‘there is a competing effect which can overcome the desire of the antiD3s to embiggen, namely their attraction towards the wrapped D5s’. Most cromulent.

  Is Homer Simpson the new Shakespeare?

  Textese

  The mobile phone and Facebook have become so much a part of personal communication that a whole new shorthand language has developed. Purists dismiss it as a sort of viral disease of GR8s and 4Us which is wrecking language with its lazy spellings and impenetrable acronyms. Yet language needs to be expedient, and abbreviations or acronyms can be jolly useful. We happily talk about ASAP or DIY or BYOB (bring your own bottle). So the texter or the Twitterer or the Facebooker, who needs to be speedy and save money by using as few letters as possible and avoid finger strain, abbreviates words – often in highly ingenuous ways.

  Some of these abbreviations are fairly functional: GR8 (great), BRB (be right back), ATB (all the best) and HRU (how are you?). Some bits of textese have become so widespread that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, they’ve officially entered the English language. New entries for 2011 are OMG (Oh my God) and LOL (laughing out loud), joining IMHO (in my humble opinion), TMI (too much information) and BFF (best friends forever). Textese can be playful, personal – MWAH to suggest the sound of sending a kiss and RME for ‘rolling my eyes’. The really interesting words are those which are stepping out of the text zone and entering spoken language. LOL is now used as a noun for laugh – lol – or a verb – to lol. JK for ‘just joking’ is added at the end a sentence: ‘I forgot your birthday … JK!’. Soz! has become a lighthearted ‘sorry’.

  Keypad symbols can portray moods in texts – although they do require a certain repositioning of the mobile phone to get the full effect:

  :) (happy),

  :( (sad)

  :-D (laughing)

  If you want to describe your reaction to something funny, you might send a text combining symbol and abbreviation :)E2E, meaning ‘grinning ear to ear’.

  Textese isn’t limited to youth – after all, everyone is looking for ways to send messages as quickly and cheaply as possible. A competition for a texting Poet Laureate awarded second prize to this love poem:

  O hart tht sorz

  My luv adorz

  He mAks me liv

  He mAks me giv

  Myslf 2 him

  As my luv porz

  The ode to her husband was texted by a sixty-eight-year-old grandmother from Lancashire.

  Teenglish (or Romeo and His Fit Bitch Jules)

  What’s fascinating about the way language evolves is the increasing influence young people have on it. Just as from the 1960s onwards a you
th culture has dominated music and fashion, so playfulness and experimentation in language has become the preserve of the young. In today’s multicultural Britain, the language of the school and the street is influenced by West African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and black American as well as urban British. Take the word bling (or sometimes bling-bling), which originated in American hip-hop culture to mean ostentatious clothing or jewellery, possibly imitating the clashing sound of jewellery or light reflecting off it. Bling was taken up by young people in the UK at the beginning of the twenty-first century, adopted by an older generation within a few years and is being dropped now as old hat by the younger generation. Or nang, a word meaning excellent or great, which seems to have spread in the last decade from Bangladeshi communities in the East End of London to other ethnic groups. It’s thought to be from a Bengali expression for a naked woman.

  Ali G: ‘voice of da yoof’

  The opening line of Romeo and Juliet was translated into London slang by satirical author Martin Baum in Romeo and His Fit Bitch Jules: ‘Verona was de turf of de feuding Montagues and de Capulet families. And coz they was always brawling and stuff, de prince of Verona told them to cool it or else they was gonna get well mashed if they carried on larging it with each other.’ Baum, like the fictional TV character Ali G (hip-hop obsessed ‘voice of da yoof’), uses Jafaican, a mixture of Jamaican, Asian and Cockney. Linguists refer to it as multicultural London English, a patios which is increasingly the language of young, inner-London, working-class people and has introduced words like bare for ‘very’ (‘I’m bare hungry’), peng for ‘attractive’ or ‘hot’, yoot for child or children and yard for home.

  Many of these words spread out from London to the rest of the country via television or music or Facebook, although a recent unscientific but revealing BBC survey of teenage slang around Britain showed huge regional variations. Teenagers were given the following sentences to translate into their own local slang:

  John’s girlfriend is really pretty. But she got mad with him the other day because he wanted to hang out with his friends rather than take her to the cinema. She got really angry and stormed off. It was very funny.

  Teenagers from a school in west London put it into their own street slang:

  John’s chick is proper buff but she switched on her man the other day cos he wanted to jam with his bred’rins instead of taking her out to the cinema. She was proper vexed and dust out. It was bare jokes.

  Compare the London slang with that of a school in Keighley, West Yorkshire:

  Jonny’s bird is proper fit and she got in a right beef the other day cos he’d rather chill with his mates than go to the cinema. She got stressed and did one. It was quality haha.

  And a school in Swansea in Wales:

  John’s missus is flat out bangin’. But she was tampin’ the other day ’cause he bombed her out for the boys instead of going to the cinema. She started mouthing. It was hilarious.

  Use of the word innit – probably British Asian in origin – is increasingly commonplace amongst young people. In its simplest form it means ‘isn’t it?’ – ‘That’s right, innit?’ – but its usage is being expanded in a rather interesting way. In linguistics, phrases like ‘isn’t it?’ at the end of statements are called tag questions. English has lots of them. ‘You’d better go now, hadn’t you?’ ‘Oh I must, must I?’ ‘That’s quite a wind blowing, isn’t it?’ Other languages often have just one fixed phrase or invariant tag. In French, it’s n’est-ce pas?, in German, nicht wahr?, in Spanish, ¿verdad? Innit, according to some linguists, is being used by young people as an invariant tag and may end up providing English with the n’est-ce pas it lacks. It’s quite a thought, innit?

  Ins and Outs

  Slang and jargon serve a similar purpose – to separate the ‘in’ from the ‘out’ group. And nowhere are these definitions more important than in school. Berkeley High is a state school in the San Francisco Bay Area with over 3,000 students. It’s unusual in having a large, educated, middle-class catchment mainly from Berkeley University as well as many lower-paid immigrant families. It’s a melting pot of races – white, Afro-American, Latino, Asian and lots of mixes in between; a veritable Tower of Babel. So the desire to establish a common but exclusive slang vocabulary is strong. The students even compiled their own dictionary of slang, which, when published in 2004, became a local bestseller. Much of the language comes from African-American hip-hop, but Chicano (Mexican English), Jewish, Hindi, punk and sports cultures also contribute words and expressions.

  One of the students, Connor, explains: ‘Berkeley is one of the most diverse places you’ll ever be. We have so much slang because we have every ethnic group, we have every social class. It’s the only public school in Berkeley, so everybody that’s not in a private school is here in Berkeley High. So the slang is different, and that’s why there’s so much of it … We have all the language and we use it all.’

  The current students dismiss the 2004 dictionary as being already outdated; school slang has moved on. One girl describes with great excitement how words change overnight; a random expression appears, and suddenly everyone’s using it.

  ‘It can change in one day. Like one hour to the next, it can be just a new word … Someone can know someone and says, “Oh this isn’t new,” and then someone else says, “I’ve never heard that before in my life.” That’s how weird it is because it’s such a huge range of people.’

  ‘But eventually it will become nationwide.’

  ‘Yeah, it becomes big. So it just travels.’

  ‘I know people who go to St Mary’s [College High School in Albany, California], and I was with them when they started a word and then like a month later I heard it at Berkeley High. So they made up the word, they spread it around St Mary’s, someone hung out with someone at St Mary’s, heard it and started saying it here.’

  Changing schools can be like moving to a foreign country, ‘literally like trying to learn a new language’.

  Social networking – Facebook and Twitter – can speed up the process: slang can spread like a disease.

  ‘Yeah, but slang’s not a disease!’ shouts one.

  ‘It’s a positive thing,’ says another. ‘It’s like language is gonna evolve one way or another.’

  ‘Language does not have a right and wrong. Language is just how people communicate.’

  These teenagers derive real pleasure from their language, constantly creating or borrowing new words, rejecting old ones. The students give a quick run-down on current school slang.

  ‘When some people say you’re cool, they say, “you got swag”.’

  ‘If I say “swag points”, it means that you just said something hella cool.’

  Hella puts emphasis on everything – that girl’s hella pretty. Hella has become so much part of North Californian vocabulary that scientists have been lobbying for it to join the likes of mega and giga as an internationally accepted prefix for a number with twenty-seven zeros.

  Arkotalko, apparently, is a brand new word for awkward. A scrub is a loser and a cuddy is a friend, as is cuzzo, homie and dog. And if you go hypi, you go crazy.

  The students talk about the role played by music and dance moves in the spread of slang words.

  ‘There are certain words used in certain areas because there are certain dances and certain movements going off in different areas. Like when you say a “hyfi” in Oakland, they call it “the hyfi woman” and then in LA, it was a dance called “jerking”. And that was a major thing in LA. People still did it in different areas but it’s major areas where things start and where they’re most popular.’

  ‘It can start anywhere. Even if it’s started in some weird town in Ohio, it’s all about the song. ’Cos when you put a song on iTunes, everyone in the world can hear it. So that’s kind of just how it spreads.’

  Hip-hop and Rap

  Pop culture from the early twentieth century onwards has injected countless new words and expressions into our language. As
the students from Berkeley High point out, music acts as a vector for words; one of the most influential forms these days is hip-hop and rap.

  Hip-hop is a style of music which started in the 1970s in the United States amongst the African-American and Jamaican-American communities of the big cities. It began with disc jockeys creating rhythmic beats by repeating small portions of songs on two turntables. This was later accompanied by rap, which is the lyrical part of hip hop, a sort of verbal rhyming chanted over the beats. Rapping is also called MCing or emceeing, short for Master of Ceremonies.

  H. Samy Alim, a professor of linguistic anthropology at California’s Stanford University, specializes in black language and hip-hop culture. In the company of rapping DJ Kenard ‘K2’ Karter, he discusses how rapping can be seen as an extension of an African-American oral tradition that stretches back through the passionate oratory of the black preachers to the generation-to-generation storytelling of the slaves.

  ‘The word rap,’ says Professor Alim, ‘was used in the black community long before it was associated with music. If you could rap, that was your talking ability … The gift of the gab.’

  ‘It’s metaphors,’ adds ‘K2’. ‘The hip-hoppers we see today aren’t just describing their own experiences; they’re describing the experiences of others.’