(no subject)
greygirlbeast brought up slang today and my comment ran long, so I figured I'd put it here:
An odd thing. I was complaining to Spooky about baffling online slang, and that led to a general discussion of slang as a phenomenon associated more with subcultures than with linguistic evolution, and to a discussion of slang that attended various times and scenes and geographical regions (the Jazz Age, hippies in the sixties, Cockney rhyming slang, surfer slang, etc.), and that led to a rather peculiar realization: As a child and teenager, I used very little - virtually none - of the slang that would be associated with the seventies and early eighties. Almost none. I began trying to list words. I came up with "cool" and "man" (before the ubiquitous "dude") and one two more. I used a tiny bit of older slang I got from my mother - "neat," for example. Hell, "cool" and "man" weren't truly of my generation. It's all became very confusing. Sure, I used Southern Appalachian/Alabama euphemisms, but there was very little that followed from pop culture. I'm still racking my brain over this. I didn't even truly discover profanity - another facet of slang - until I was in my mid teens (which might seem odd, what with me now being such a connoisseur of dirty words and all).
But, this was long before the internet. I posit that the internet has forever changed the evolution, propagation, and longevity of slang. It's an interesting problem.
And here's the comment: Linguists tend to think that we use the words that are most effective in communicating to the people we care about most. So teenagers--detaching from their parents and bonding with each other/finding themselves, even if only temporarily--will always try to conjure new codes. But I think that being enough of an outsider from teenage culture would make one less engaged in that phenomenon. For me, goth culture and drug culture (or counterculture) led to my embracing a lot of slang and I bet I tried to "seem cool" in high school, but I'm well-aware that I failed mightily. I guess we used to sit around and all do Billy Burroughs impressions in college too, now that I think about it. That almost counts.
But there has been a flattening of slang due to the rise of the Internet (which I have been capitalizing again lately, like Big Brother). Now, the latest prefab pop confection can have her personal assistant tweet something that makes no sense and teenagers around the world will use it for a week or two to see if it's "cool" or whatever. But the net result seems to be so much less meaningful communication that my prediction would be that American vocabularies are shrinking...
Yet again, I think of Peter Lamborn Wilson telling me, early on, that the "Internet is infinitely wide but only a micron deep"...
I didn't believe him at all. My loss.
An odd thing. I was complaining to Spooky about baffling online slang, and that led to a general discussion of slang as a phenomenon associated more with subcultures than with linguistic evolution, and to a discussion of slang that attended various times and scenes and geographical regions (the Jazz Age, hippies in the sixties, Cockney rhyming slang, surfer slang, etc.), and that led to a rather peculiar realization: As a child and teenager, I used very little - virtually none - of the slang that would be associated with the seventies and early eighties. Almost none. I began trying to list words. I came up with "cool" and "man" (before the ubiquitous "dude") and one two more. I used a tiny bit of older slang I got from my mother - "neat," for example. Hell, "cool" and "man" weren't truly of my generation. It's all became very confusing. Sure, I used Southern Appalachian/Alabama euphemisms, but there was very little that followed from pop culture. I'm still racking my brain over this. I didn't even truly discover profanity - another facet of slang - until I was in my mid teens (which might seem odd, what with me now being such a connoisseur of dirty words and all).
But, this was long before the internet. I posit that the internet has forever changed the evolution, propagation, and longevity of slang. It's an interesting problem.
And here's the comment: Linguists tend to think that we use the words that are most effective in communicating to the people we care about most. So teenagers--detaching from their parents and bonding with each other/finding themselves, even if only temporarily--will always try to conjure new codes. But I think that being enough of an outsider from teenage culture would make one less engaged in that phenomenon. For me, goth culture and drug culture (or counterculture) led to my embracing a lot of slang and I bet I tried to "seem cool" in high school, but I'm well-aware that I failed mightily. I guess we used to sit around and all do Billy Burroughs impressions in college too, now that I think about it. That almost counts.
But there has been a flattening of slang due to the rise of the Internet (which I have been capitalizing again lately, like Big Brother). Now, the latest prefab pop confection can have her personal assistant tweet something that makes no sense and teenagers around the world will use it for a week or two to see if it's "cool" or whatever. But the net result seems to be so much less meaningful communication that my prediction would be that American vocabularies are shrinking...
Yet again, I think of Peter Lamborn Wilson telling me, early on, that the "Internet is infinitely wide but only a micron deep"...
I didn't believe him at all. My loss.