Language
Happy Easter to all who celebrate! Today's riff is about kids and language, now just how they mangle it, but how they use it, including their landmines.
I was also thinking about private language, how people develop their own terms. Sometimes those break into the world, and sometimes just stay in the group, to fade with lack of use or dispersal of the group.
Slang, too, can propagate oddly. I was thinking the other day about how some of Georgette Heyer's distinctive idiom which she apparently liked so much she worked into dialogue in her Regency novels in a way you don't actually find in period work, fiction or non. Then, two hundred years later, how traces of it show up in SF works by authors who were influenced by Heyer as teens.
If one reads in the period, it's interesting to come across slang that Heyer hadn't discovered, or didn't use. Like "sprack." That was, for a while, the word for cool, elite, top-notch, among the Duke of Wellington and his social crowd at the top of the living Silver Fork heap. But it was popular in the 1820s or so, just outside Heyer's favorite period, so if she knew of it, she didn't use it.
I remember 'groovy' was actually only seriously used for a brief time--less than a year, at least in my region. But it persisted for years on TV and in books when someone wanted to present a hippie character. It could be used sarcastically, though, until the mid-seventies, and then it was too dorky even for sarcasm.
I was also thinking about private language, how people develop their own terms. Sometimes those break into the world, and sometimes just stay in the group, to fade with lack of use or dispersal of the group.
Slang, too, can propagate oddly. I was thinking the other day about how some of Georgette Heyer's distinctive idiom which she apparently liked so much she worked into dialogue in her Regency novels in a way you don't actually find in period work, fiction or non. Then, two hundred years later, how traces of it show up in SF works by authors who were influenced by Heyer as teens.
If one reads in the period, it's interesting to come across slang that Heyer hadn't discovered, or didn't use. Like "sprack." That was, for a while, the word for cool, elite, top-notch, among the Duke of Wellington and his social crowd at the top of the living Silver Fork heap. But it was popular in the 1820s or so, just outside Heyer's favorite period, so if she knew of it, she didn't use it.
I remember 'groovy' was actually only seriously used for a brief time--less than a year, at least in my region. But it persisted for years on TV and in books when someone wanted to present a hippie character. It could be used sarcastically, though, until the mid-seventies, and then it was too dorky even for sarcasm.