Languages in the Big Apple

William Safire’s latest contribution to the Sunday Times tries in vain to prove that the old man ain’t a square. “Language: translating the lingo of adultalescence” is a brief summary of the colloquialisms of today’s young-but-not-that-young. Let’s take a look at what he came up with:

Sketchy about the lingo being spoken by today’s adultalescents? As those in their late teens and early adulthood like to say, Ah-ite!
The sound of that last word is hard to convey on the printed page. The famous cry in comic books of a man being thrown out a window - Aiee-ee - comes closer to the first semi-syllable of the slurred word, but there is a hint of a at the end. When you ask a young person conversant in this campuspeak (a word created on the analogy of George Orwell’s newspeak) a question like “Would you do this for me?” you are likely to hear the answer “Ah-ite“.
The meaning is “O.K.” The sound is an amalgam of all and right, which used to sound like “aw-rite” but now is compressed into a sliding “a’ight”, as the teen-slanguist Fred Lynch transcribes it.

A few other brilliant translations:

Adorkable = endearing though socially inept
Fauxhawk = hairstyle achieved by combing all of the hair to the center to give the appearance of a Mohawk without shaving the head.”
Ginormous = gigantic + enormous
Chillax = chill + relax

… and a few other words you already know and use, plus several you’ve probably never heard of and were probably the result of some kid pulling old Safire’s leg.

Take a look here.

Here’s some good news: British researchers recently released a study claiming that profanity in the workplace can “boost morale and esprit de corps.”

“The study observed workers at a mail-order warehouse in England, which employed 14 people, and six focus groups of 10 to 20 people, two in England and six in the USA,” according to the Eastern Daily Press. “They included full-time and part-time workers in a variety of organisations, ranging from restaurants and retail, to a bank, nursing home and hospital.”

Yehuda Baruch, professor of management at the University of East Anglia, adds, “For some people, the use of profanity is a way to create collegiality. For others, it’s a way to relieve stress.”

The study’s other shocking revelations include the fact that young people tend to swear more often than older folks, and that some people find swearing offensive – Baruch himself, actually. He’s quoted as saying: “Personally, I detest the use of profanity. I don’t use it myself and I think it’s something terrible to do.”

Hmm. If he finds it so appalling, why did he conduct a study on it? In any case, journalists got a little giddy in their coverage of the report; here are a few headlines, courtesy of USA Today:

F-Yeah! Swearing At Work Is OK, Study Finds

Office Expletives: H— Yeah!

That’s for $@#! Sure

What the …? Workplace profanity boosts morale: study

Hey-ho.. It’s eff to work we go

Ever wonder where bad words come from? According to the Daily Utah Chronicle, the school paper of the University of Utah, a class called Bad Words and Taboo Terms teaches just that.

Described as “an introduction to linguistics as a whole”, the course examines expletives from around the world to chart the linguistics behind obscenities. It sounds pretty cool: Randall Eggert, a linguistics professor at the University, covers the whole spectrum of dirty words, from profanity to blasphemy, racial, ethnic and social slurs, and the significance of curse words all over the globe.

What’s really interesting about this course is the fact that it’s offered in Utah, the Mormon capital of the world. For the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, swearing is right up there with drinking, drugging, and pre-marital heavy petting — i.e. not kosher. Perhaps you remember the 2005 story of Tyler Poulson, a Mormon teen who jumped from a moving truck to avoid hearing his buds talk nasty about some bitches.

But Eggert, while eager to appease the worries of critics (who’d most likely come in the form of devout parents), also seems ready to defend his cause: “I will never use any word that I wouldn’t use in a lecture,” he said. “I will mention (taboo terms) in quotation or example sentences, but this class is not censored.”

He goes on to assure the paper that he is not looking to offend students and urges those sensitive to potty-talk to consider not enrolling. While the class would obviously provide some titillation to profanity-deprived college kids, the topic is also a great look at the cross-pollination of anthropology of language studies.

For example, the Australian Guugu Yimidhirr tribe forbids any man to address his mother-in-law directly. Instead, he must use a set of inanimate objects — whatever’s lying around — as intermediaries.

Sounds pretty interesting. It’s also probably a pretty big step towards a more liberal academic discourse for the University of Utah.

In my last post I argued that language should belong to everybody. I was lying. It shouldn’t. The word “rape”, for example, shouldn’t belong to anybody who isn’t talking about, well, rape.

• Problem: Freddy likes to say, “I got raped by my biology final” instead of, “Gee. That biology final sure was tough!”
• My take: Ew.

• Problem: “The Yankees are really raping the Red Sox this season.”
• My take: Rapists are winners! Yay! Wait, what?

Sometimes these misogynistic bastards manage to evoke rape imagery without even using the word. As in:

Sandy: “So, Brad, I hear you’ve taken up gardening.”
Brad: “Yeah, I’ve been sticking my dick in that a little.”

You could argue that “sticking your dick” into something isn’t necessarily rape (the garden was asking for it, I swear!), but it’s still not a very pleasant image to conjure. And in the case of the horny biology final, a penis is given to an inanimate object. Phallocentrism in full effect.

Ultimately my problems with “rape” are identical to those that render any word offensive: by using the term lightly, we ignore and belittle the gravity of its literal meaning or original context.

So then, why can’t I stop calling things “retarded”? I guess our sensitivity is limited to the things we care about. I have no real connection to anyone who’s actually retarded, but hearing “rape” pisses me off because I’m a girl with a feminist agenda. Alas.

I suppose I’d be willing to make a deal of some sort. I’ll stop saying “retarded” if you stop saying “rape”? But in the muddled Venn Diagram that is derogation, a fair trade isn’t really possible. Maybe we’ve got to stay on the “Everyone Can Say Everything” Train a little longer, until every insult is equally impotent.

In the meantime, keep your voice down.

It’s a time-worn question: Who owns a word?

In trying to answer, I’ve come to recognize myself as a huge hypocrite. In this post, I’ll cover the pro-appropriation argument; in the next, I’ll show the flip-side.

So, who owns a word? My initial response is anybody and everybody. This can often mean trouble. Examples:

• Problem: Freddy gets mad when his friends joke about being “alcoholics” because his father’s alcoholism destroyed the family.
• My take: I think it’s funny to call anyone who drinks too much an alcoholic. And usually when you joke about people being alcoholics, it turns out they actually kind of are…

• Problem: Lilah doesn’t like it when “anorexic” is used to describe people who aren’t because she was hospitalized for the eating disorder.
• My take: Skinny people should be ridiculed as much as they are envied; I say calling them anorexic — or “ana” — is just dandy. Also, real anorexics are neurotic and annoying. We should make fun of them more often.

• Problem: Lisa has two siblings with Down Syndrome; she feels hurt and angry when people use the word “retarded”.
• My take: I’m a little torn here. I realize its offensive nature, and it pains my heart to think about it, but sometimes I let it slip. I can’t help it!

How very post-p.c. But is that really a problem? In the end, a word is just a word. Right? As any third-wave feminist will tell you, a derogatory term loses its power when it becomes the property of the people it’s meant to subjugate.

We all know the story — African-Americans have taken back n*gger, gays have nabbed fag and dyke, and feminists have stolen bitch, c*nt, whore, etc.

Language-mutilation in the form of appropriation — it’s a theory to which I like to subscribe. It’s both empowering, and, well, convenient.

So I’m currently in the middle of a slightly unhealthy obsession with Evelyn Waugh. I’ve devoured seven of his fourteen novels and most recently, Fathers and Sons, the epic saga of the famous literary family written by his grandson, Alexander Waugh.

I won’t go into why Evelyn’s the greatest novelist who ever lived, nor will I bore you salivating over his dialogue sequences (so good).

No, what I really want to talk about is the colloquialisms of Waugh’s upper-crust subjects, particularly their penchant for inventing fancy versions of adjectives by adding “-making” as a suffix.

It works wonders. Check it out:

If something is embarrassing, it’s “simply too shy-making.”
Whatever makes you feel nauseous is “ill-making.”
Whatever you take to feel better is “better-making.”

You get the idea.

When and why did this linguistic construct disappear? It’s so practical! So perfectly concise! So user-friendly! Put away your thesaurus; just say how you feel and add “-making” at the end.

You’d think the simplicity of the construct alone would have kept it around to this day. Maybe it still exists in the U.K., but I’ve certainly never heard anyone use it in New York.

Wait. That’s a lie. One of my professors from college said “shy-making” once. But she was a writing teacher, and a Catholic, so there’s no doubt in my mind that she was just giving a shout-out to old Evy-poo.

I googled “shy-making” to see what I could dig up. A bunch of British blogs had links to something called the Splendidizer, a language-beautification operation on the now-defunct website for Bright Young Things, the movie inspired by Waugh’s Vile Bodies. The Splendidizer could supposedly turn any boring paragraph into prose that Lady Agatha Runcible herself would find laugh-making.

The Splendidizer may be gone, but it’s time to bring this ingenious idiom back to life on our own. To let it die out completely would be too sad-making. New York, consider this a call to action.