Word: slangs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...heroes in Aksyonov's books were teen-age runaways who craved rokmuzyka, wore Keds and dzhinsy and talked a nonstop street slang larded with Americanisms, just like real-life Russians. Predictably, Aksyonov's very popularity with the young made him suspect to the Soviet literary Establishment. Yet he remained a member of the Union of Soviet Writers for 18 years...
...classic slang of the '60s is almost a dead language now. In unadulterated form it survives only under the protection of certain purists with long memories, heirs to the medieval tradition of monastic scribes. Their honorary abbot is Phil Donahue...
...slang cannot live forever on the past, no matter how magnificent it may have been. Slang needs to be new. Its life is brief, intense and slightly disreputable, like adolescence. Soon it either settles down and goes into the family business of the language (like taxi and cello and hi) or, more likely, slips off into oblivion, dead as Oscan and Manx. The evening news should probably broadcast brief obituaries of slang words that have passed on. The practice would prevent people from embarrassing themselves by saying things like swell or super. "Groovy, descendant of cool and hip, vanished from...
Where is the next generation of slang to come from? Not from Valley Girl, the argot made famous lately by Singer Frank Zappa and his daughter, who is named Moon Unit Zappa. "Val" is really a sort of satire of slang, a goof on language and on the dreamily dumb and self-regarding suburban kids who may actually talk like that. It would come out all wrong if a minister were to compose his sermon in Val. "The Lord is awesome," he would have to begin. "He knows that life can sometimes be, like, grody-grody...
...Still, slang has deep resources. The French resist barbaric intrusions into the language of Voltaire and Descartes. But American English has traditionally welcomed any bright word that sailed in, no matter how ragged it may have looked on arrival. That Whitmanesque hospitality has given America the richest slang in the world...