Number 74
Have you ever invented a new piece of slang? Do you think you could? Try it. That's your assignment. It's not as easy as it seems to come up with something fresh that people would actually use. Someone told me once that he broke a shoelace one morning before school, and being in a hurry replaced it with one of a different color. He hoped the other kids might think it was cool and that it might catch on and become a fad at his high school, but it didn't. Imagine the odds of an unusual verbalization ~ and we make lots of them, usually by accident ~ snowballing till it spreads all over the country. I never even had any luck trying on a new nickname for myself. It's easy to say slang blossoms out of a particular subculture, but in fact it has to come from one person.
Slang or new coinages are created to fill a need, as in jargon for new technologies, or to express fresh feelings on an old subject.
One of the students in my ill-fated English Comp class last year was curious to know if I had any knowledge of current black slang, so he asked if I would know what he meant if he said I was "looking phat." Luckily, I did, and luckily I didn't get sidetracked by "fat," which would have been not inapplicable. But phat means good.
A reasonable sounding explanation of the origin of this word appears on www.urbandictionary.com (a Web site that posts definitions by contributors, some funny stuff; this particular definition comes from another site, www.wordorigins.org):
. . . phat is most likely simply a slang respelling of fat. Such respellings are common in slang. And fat has a long history of meaning rich, abundant, or desirable. Fat has been used this way in English since the early 17th century, and in other languages for far longer. The specific sexual connotation of phat is likely just a specialization of the general meaning. Some suggest it may be a clipping of emphatic. Again, there is no evidence for this last, but at least it's more plausible than any of the acronymic origins.Phat is also older than you might think. It has been a staple of African American slang since at least 1963.
Why bother respelling a word? To add that new car smell.
I'm not sure if my student was pleased or not that I knew what he meant. He muttered something about having to invent new words once slang words became commonplace and known to everyone outside their home of origin. The new car smell dissipates. Slang serves to distinguish a group and mystify outsiders, which is why young people are rich sources of new slang, and why slang is usually ephemeral, though many slang words have become permanent fixtures in the language.
Someone else griped to me because the phrase "back in the day" had been co-opted by white people; she said this is an old black expression. I don't know when or where it originated, but certainly it's not one I grew up with. We would say "in the old days" or talk about how things used to be. "Back in the day" has an added air of nostalgia because of the article "the" before "day": those were the days, but that was the day. What the day is varies depending on the context, so the phrase assumes a shared experience between the speaker and listener. It's nice, and it's English, so I think we should share. It's not proprietary anymore.
Although a search of "jitter" shows other definitions, I think one older meaning is "young girl." I'd appreciate it if anyone can help me out on this. Years ago when I was in college I told a young black man that someone we knew had married an 18-year-old girl, and he said something like, "I wouldn't have thought he was a jitterbug." Last weekend, I heard Sonny Robertson use the word "jitter" in reference to a young girl or woman, but I haven't had a chance to ask him about it. I'm thinking a "jitterbug" might be someone who likes much younger women, but these are the only two instances of this usage I've run across.
More spelling slang: Recently I read "boi" (like "boy") on a magazine cover, meaning a female-to-male transsexual. The letter "i" is traditionally a "feminine" or "weak" ending in English names (e.g. usually "Toni" is a girl and "Tony" is a boy), so the new slang formation has a sort of historical foundation (possibly unconscious). On the other hand, "grrrl" does not mean a male-to-female transgendered person. The growling "grrr" plus L means a tough, independent young female, possibly though not necessarily lesbian.
"How easy was that?" (or "How cool" etc.) is a rhetorical question that has become as ubiquitous as "Absolutely!" used in place of "Yes." I'm not sure that these fill a void. What they do is add emphasis, but constant emphasis weakens itself and demands escalation.
The above-mentioned www.wordorgins.org has an interesting history of the phrase "politically correct," which I won't copy here (you can look it up), but I would add to their discussion the possibility that the phrase was used by party Communists to identify positions that might be in line with the facts or with their own opinions, but not with party doctrine.
Fred was surprised to hear me say, "It's pouring the rain down." He'd never heard that expression before, but it seems like I've always heard it. Now that I think of it, maybe I only heard it at home, growing up. More common is, "It's pouring" or even "It's pouring rain" or "It's pouring down." Which reminds me of a 14th-century English poem by the well known writer Anonymous:
O Westren wind when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Note the old spelling "Westren." Maybe you've heard people say "childern" for "children." Perhaps "childern" was once an acceptable pronunciation, but now we've got "western" and "children." No reason, probably; it's just what is, which is not what was.
On a barn roof: "BANK VICTIM"
Highway sign: "NATURALIZED AREA"
And numerous "SCENIC RIVERS" that cannot be seen because of the concrete walls of the bridges that cross them, except possibly by truck drivers high up in their cabs. Or up in their high cabs.
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