Word: slangs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inventory of American slang now, however, can be somewhat disappointing. Slang today seems to lack the playful energy and defiant self-confidence that can send language darting out to make raffish back-alley metaphorical connections and shrewdly teasing inductive games of synonym...
Examine one fairly new item: airhead. It means, of course, a brainless person, someone given to stupid behavior and opinions. But it is a vacuous, dispiriting little effort. The word has no invective force or metaphorical charm. When slang settles for the drearily literal (airhead equals empty head), it is too tired to keep up with the good stuff...
...Much new slang originates with people who have to be in by 8. Junior high and even grade school are unexpectedly productive sources. Sometimes children simply take ordinary words and hold them up to the light at a slightly different angle, an old trick of slang. The ten-year-old will pronounce something "excellent" in the brisk, earnest manner of an Army colonel who has just inspected his regiment. (Primo means the same thing.) The movie E. T. has contributed penis breath, an aggressively weird phrase in perfect harmony with the aggressively weird psyche of the eight-year...
...young, as always, use slang as an instrument to define status, to wave to peers and even to discipline reality. A real jerk may be a nerkey, a combination of nerd and turkey. Is something gnarly? That may be good or bad. But if it is mega-gnarly, that is excellent. One may leave a sorority house at U.C.L.A. to mow a burger. Slang has less ideological content now than it had in the '60s. Still, it sometimes arises, like humor, from apprehension. High school students say, "That English test really nuked me." On the other hand, in black...
...frat-house leer is evident in today's collegiate slang. To get naked means to have a good time, whether or not sex is involved. (That is a new shortened form of the get-drunk-and-get-naked party, which collegians fantasized about 20 years ago.) At Michigan State University, one who is vomiting is driving the bus, a reference to the toilet seat and the wretch's need to hang on to it. Sckacks means ugly. A two-bagger is a girl who requires exactly that to cover her ugliness. Young women, of course, retaliate. At breakfast...