Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (3 page)

In fact, campus-talk is a melting pot into which go all of the above. It brings together in one place not only the national and regional slangs of students' home
bases –
walk of shame
from the US,
meff
from Liverpool,
lush
from the westcountry – but also so-called multiethnic youth dialect or
MLE
, the Afro-Caribbean-flavoured gang-oriented lexicon (
bare
,
endz
and
wasteman
are examples) and accent that has spread from inner cities across the entire UK. Every clique and each campus differs, but some common features I have noted are puns (
married alive
), cultural allusions (
Yea, verily, Brother Kyle
), babytalk (
lickle gay bear
), faux-yiddish (
shnippy
,
shnide
), and ‘French' pronunciation of words like
rummage
(sex) and
bummage
(enjoyment). Very rarely do you come across an expression that has no obvious derivation or is a one-off invention:
bosfotick
, meaning drunk and
mahoodally
, meaning unattractive or odd, are recent examples from King's College London.

What is student slang for? To find new ways (striking, funny and provocative if possible) of describing the communal experiences (
getting messy
,
chirpsing
and
sharking
,
swotting
and
cotching
) of a new phase in one's life; to show that one belongs to the in-crowd (or rather, nowadays, the multiethnic
innit-crowd
) and simply to celebrate the window of freedom that comes between family, school and, it is hoped, eventually, work.

The notion that slang subverts youth literacy is embraced by some educators and official advisors, as well as some parents, and many members of the public who feel instinctively that standards are slipping and certainties are being undermined. For older people especially, any radically new and unfamiliar form of language will have a disturbing, destabilising, alienating effect which can go beyond rationality and may trigger powerful emotional responses. On a frivolous level there are some places where the older generation can go for help. Confused parents have the Family Lives Got a Teenager website (
http://familylives.org.uk/advice/teenagers/you-and-your-teen/jargon-buster/
), a glossary of ‘teen-talk', while the baffled elderly have the over-50s Saga Group's Woteva mobile phone app (
http://www.saga.co.uk/saga-magazine/woteva/february-16-2012.aspx
), which purports to translate the language of youth into a version of English with which they are familiar.

Multiethnic youth slang does play the role, as slangs always have, of a ‘cryptolect' or secret code available, for instance, to members of street gangs and rioters. As part of my role I am sometimes asked to act as expert witness in criminal cases, usually very distressing cases, where the evidence turns upon interpretation of slang synonyms for shoot, stab, assault, rob, etc. So I certainly don't dismiss the concerns of those who are uncomfortable with what they see as celebration of language varieties which seem alien and impenetrable, which do not directly contribute to mainstream social success, indeed, which are inevitably sometimes associated with social breakdown and crime. (There has been some fierce argument about how far it is legitimate to emphasise these links. I would only comment that it disturbs me when thirteen-year-olds in West London schools are familiar with all the slang terms for knives and guns, and when teenage girls greet one another with the exclamation
braap braap
! – though they may not know it, this term is an imitation of the sound of rapid-fire gunshots from a Glock machine pistol or an AK-47).

And what of the effect of technology on communication? Is the use of digital media and social networking, particularly by young people, really affecting their ability to communicate in more formal situations? Technology has given rise to the sort of codes used in electronic communications like texting, messaging and online, typically on social networking sites. The obsessive substitution of abbreviations and acronyms worries some people who think that their use is subverting correct English.
Experts are divided on the issue, some pointing out that young people who use abbreviated codes and internet slang are often among the best communicators, the most literate of their peer-group or generation. Other educationalists, teachers and examiners among them, have presented evidence that text-speak and abbreviations are indeed infiltrating formal writing and speech and that some young people are no longer aware of what is deemed correct or acceptable.

In my experience, discussing slang and exploring nonstandard language with young people and adults does not sabotage literacy, undermine the ability to deploy ‘correct' usage or promote transgressive behaviour. Just as some research shows that teens who text tend to have higher levels of literacy, young people who use slang are often already adept at style-switching and those of all ages who work with slang develop a more nuanced, reflective attitude to language use and specific questions of style, as well as to wider issues such as multiculturalism and diversity.

I'm also a teacher and there are learning opportunities when working together with my informants, in workshops in schools or in seminars in universities. Firstly, by compiling our own glossaries, looking at etymology and usage, especially at the way in which other Englishes (Caribbean, Irish, regional dialects in the UK) and non-English sources (Romany, Irish Gaelic, Panjabi, Hindi) may have affected the vocabulary. Together we also come to see how slang itself, considered objectively, is not a defective or substandard form of language but one that creatively mobilises all the technical potential of the English language, the available word-formation mechanisms, and also all the rhetorical devices that literature and poetry make use of. We go on to consider language variation and instances of it, to examine the contexts in which slang, texting conventions and other nonstandard styles are used, particularly deciding when they are or aren't appropriate (the linguists' key concept of ‘appropriacy' again).

By talking and teaching about slang, the understanding of language and society is actually deepened and extended, for students at secondary level, who become enthused and inspired by engaging with these issues, and by students in higher education who may be motivated to undertake research projects. For both groups an encounter with the rich complexity of what theorists call ‘heteroglossia' – the many voices we can potentially speak in – may go further to produce new forms of creative expression in the arts and the media.

If you would like more information about slang and other categories of new language, please visit the webpages of my Slang and New Language Archive at King's College London where you will find articles, bibliographies and links:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/elc/resources/tonythorne/slangarticles.aspx
.

No dictionary can be wholly comprehensive and this book is no exception. Space only permitted the inclusion of a selection of what I considered the most interesting, the most significant and the most relevant among the many thousands of expressions that might conceivably be characterised as slang.

For more examples there are other sources of information which I can recommend. Many of the internet sites in which slang is collected and discussed are truly democratic and genuinely user-driven, but almost none of them is authoritative, in the sense that they can be trusted to have studied the words they record, to
produce accurate or convincing etymologies rather than supposition, or to comment from a basis of familiarity with other sources. I do nonetheless thoroughly recommend Aaron Peckham's grandiose internet project, Urban Dictionary, which since 1999 has collected over seven million slang terms, insults, nicknames, private jokes and virtually uncensored and unedited linguistic eccentricities of all kinds, all posted on the site not by specialists but by private individuals from the US and across the anglosphere. I have recorded in this book some of the most popular and most interesting acronyms and abbreviations used online, but for a more complete list of these, I recommend
www.internetslang.com
. There is an extensive and accurate record of current Irish slang, also largely donated by its users, at
www.slang.ie
. Among print sources for English slang the latest and by far the most comprehensive, covering the historical and modern periods and providing dates for all first written citations, is the three-volume
Green's Dictionary of Slang
.

I would like to thank once again all the contributors to the previous editions of this dictionary. For this latest edition my sincerest thanks go to:

My agent Julian Alexander, Alana Clogan, Rosie Bick and Katy McAdam at Bloomsbury, colleagues at King's College London, in particular Professor Sir Rick Trainor, Professor Keith Hoggart, Dr Trudi Darby, Professor Colin Bushnell, Dominique Borel, Nina McDermott, Maria Jackson and John Ramsay; Paul Williams and Sean McNicholas of the UK Ministry of Justice, Susannah Moffat of Ursuline High School, Wimbledon, Dan Clayton of Saint Francis Xavier College, Akbinder Deo of Redbridge Museum Service, Kurt Mueller and Nicola Colligan of Grainger plc, Laurice O'Sullivan, George Lamb, Elizabeth Biddlecombe, Professor Michael Adams, Madeline Kripke, Dr Carmen Arnaiz, Professor Julie Coleman, Dr Maggie Scott, Aaron Peckham, Tom Dalzell, Fernandez Garcia-Quinonero, Ben Clark, Dr Faye Taylor, Nick Francis, Adam Hayes, Emma Whitfield, Alexei Witkowski, Sue Tatum, Clive Heasman, Matthew Brotherton, Kat Lay, Fizz Fieldgrass, Roland White, Chris Nott, Hero Mackenzie, Clem Crockett, Paul Lindsay-Addy, Sarah Rabia, C. A. Hamilton, Adam Hayes, Kathleen Day, Carly Morris, Tim Gaze, Samantha Herbert, Corinne Percario, Raza Shah, Gurkiran Bahra, Hema Jadeja, Elena Svereikaite, Daren Li, Shauh Shefi, Daniel Brown, Khaled Rahma, Arondeep Athwal, Masum Ullah, Lani Manuel, Natalie Mekelburg, Bex Neilson, Leanne Hua, Maddy Sammons, Maria Garcia, Elizabeth Green, Joanita Namirimu, Georgia Tickle, Suzan Dench, Emilia Caccamo, Niamh Curran, Antoinette Torto, Natalie Aquaye-Nortey, Lea Black, Siobhan Hennessey, James Hood, David Robotham, Louise Henderson, Kat Lay, Sophie Picheta, Philip Mudge, Nimesh Bhudia, Martin Stirrup, Matthew Job, Trevor Cox, Maya…and all the students, schoolkids, gang members, social workers, parents, teachers and others, who for one reason or another, have to remain anonymous. To anyone else whose name has been inadvertently left out or accidentally deleted I sincerely apologise.

Even more fulsome thanks are due to ‘J.T.', who provided vivid anecdotes and fascinating insights into authentic criminal argot and, as always, to Professor Connie C. Eble of Chapel Hill University, North Carolina for most generously sharing her semester-by-semester files of US campus slang, and to fellow – and rival – slang-buff Jonathon Green for his most valuable help and advice.

The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang is an ongoing project; a survey which by virtue of its subject needs constant updating. The idea of a reference work as something sternly authoritative and unreachably remote from its users is outmoded; thanks to electronic communications a dictionary can now interact with its readers and vice versa. This was the first interactive slang dictionary and I will be delighted if readers of this book, their friends, family members, in fact anyone they come across, are able to contribute examples of slang or are willing to share their comments, criticisms and suggestions. I'll acknowledge all contributors by name in new editions or future publications. Information about new slang terms should ideally include, as well as the meaning, details of when and where the word or phrase was used, by whom, supported by a direct quotation if possible, together with the name of the person contributing. You can email me at [email protected] or follow me on Twitter at @tonythorne007.

Tony Thorne

London, 2014

‘For that big family'

A typical entry in the dictionary will contain the components described below (with the typefaces explained in brackets):

The HEADWORDS are entered in alphabetical order (in primary bold type), together with any variant spellings or alternative forms. Next the PART OF SPEECH is given (in
italics
): these have been somewhat simplified so that an adjectival phrase appears as an adjective (
adj
), noun phrase as a noun (
n
). Unless a word is used in all parts of the English-speaking world, it is given a REGIONAL LABEL (in
italics
:
British
,
Australian
, etc.). This indicates the country of origin, or the country in which the term is most prevalent. If a particular term has more than one quite separate meaning, these meanings are NUMBERED (in
bold
type:
1
,
2
,
3
etc.). If one overall sense of a term is commonly subdivided into several slightly different meanings, these are indicated by LETTERS (in
bold
type:
a
,
b
,
c
etc.). The headword, part of speech and regional label are followed by a DEFINITION (in roman type). This in turn is followed by more information about the use and origin of the term (in roman type, unless it is a direct quote from a user, in which case it will appear in
italics
). In the explanations, foreign words are placed in
italics
and slang terms found elsewhere in the dictionary are shown in
bold
(these act as cross references throughout the dictionary). Many definitions are followed by an ILLUSTRATIVE PHRASE or sentence (in
italics
). If this example is an actual citation, its source follows in brackets.