By Lisa Pupo
Belts had been loosened and buttons undone. As we shoved our dessert remains towards the center of the table, my 17-year-old nephew declared: "Shoddy on the peach pie." Now everyone knows that my mother makes the best peach pie in the state, and we always argue about the leftovers. Shoddy? I think not.
It turns out he was calling dibs on the remaining piece of pie, not dissing it. You'd think I'd be able to decode his vernacular, since I teach hundreds like him every year. But the English language, especially in the hands of teens, changes more quickly than my nephew's girlfriends.
We're the antithesis of the French, who guard their language like the three-headed dog Cerberus protected Dante's entrance to Hell. They've even invented a special organization to act as their guard dog - the Académie française, whose job it is to "work, with all possible care and diligence, to give our language definite rules and to make it pure, eloquent, and capable of dealing with art and science."
I'd like to see what might happen if we set 100 American teens loose on L'Académie's official dictionary. I image the French might finally feel our pain - the pain of trying to follow adolescent language logic, that is.
Last spring, as a group of students filed into my class room, one of the girls shrieked, "Sick! I just want to vomit!" I whipped out the hall pass and held it out to her at arm's length. No way was I catching her germs. I needn't have worried; apparently sick means something is really cool. And of course anything that incredible makes you want to vomit. It only follows that hot actually means cool, gnarly translates into awesome, and gangsta denotes friend. Maybe they're all playing Mad Libs and just haven't told the adults.
I find it most amusing when they coin words of their own; its sort of like inventive spelling on steroids. Never heard of redonculous? It means Messed Up - capital M, capital U. (In case you didn't know, it's a good thing.) And prostitots are preteen girls who dress beyond their age. Last year's English class came up with a winner when they decided that Beowulf's layering of Christian beliefs over ancient pagan traditions equaled Godfusion. Perhaps it'll make Webster's next edition.
Sometimes language undergoes a temporary throwback, kind of like retro fashion. When I asked my students about their special brand of teen talk, they cited nifty, spiffy, and cool beans as examples of modern lingo. Add neat to that list and we can produce our own version of Woody Allen's Annie Hall.
Years spent slogging through graduate courses in communication studies have made me interested in linguistics. This summer, I was the only American traveling with a group of Brits; Spanish wasn't the only language I needed help with during those weeks. I got tired; they got knackered. They thought the scenery was brilliant; to me it was awesome. Their chips are our fries, their crisps our chips, their biscuits our cookies. By the time I flew home, friendships had been firmly founded in analysis of the King's English.
The imprint of the news media in language development is apparent on both sides of the pond as well. How did we ever get through conversations without Seinfeld's linguistic shortcut of yada, yada, yada? And even more intriguing, before Jerry invented the term close talker, did such people exist?
After the "shoddy" family dinner, I questioned my students about my nephew's choice of words. Apparently I had to go back to the time when wagons were the main mode of transportation in order to fully understand the word's evolution, which began with the idea of riding shotgun. As protection from bandits, the guy next to the driver literally rode with his shotgun at the ready. This turned into calling shotgun as a way of declaring the intent to ride up front, which morphed into calling shotty, which became shoddy since lazy Americans tend not to enunciate.
Checking out language is sweet. Groovy, even. Oh, snap! I've hit my word limit. If you want to chat, then hit me up and holla back through my e-mail.
