It’s the bomb dot com
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language… Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind. — Salman Rushdie
As someone living squarely in the twin worlds of words and pop culture, I’m somewhat maniacally drawn to all things related to language and youth. To me, prose — who uses it, when, why and how — paints a fascinating picture of the issues of our times and articulates the realities around us. Call me a word nerd or a pop snob, but I do tend to assess people — playfully, I might add — based on their chosen slanguage and preferred cultural references. These days, as it turns out, you are definitely what you know.
That said, there’s an expression I still seem to hear being kicked around in everyday conversation, one that makes me vomit ever so slightly in my mouth: chillax. A contraction of “chill” and “relax,” the term would’ve been acceptable except, last I looked out the window, it was no longer 2003, the year it was deathlessly cool to be heard saying it. If my ginkgo biloba serves me right, it was in
On that note, another neologism that was on the bleeding edge of youthspeak at around the same time was “cougar,” which referred to an older woman preying on a much younger man. Again, I came across this idiom while rolling in the
The Flyest
While on the subject of old words taking on a vaguely new resonance, I couldn’t help but notice a slew of resurrected ‘90s-era slang being bandied about and put to different use. In a number of online forums, for example, the very 1999-sounding “It’s the bomb” has been brought to the present as “It’s the bomb dot com.” Sigh. And when The Wackness — a 1994-set coming-of-age indie about a rap-loving NYC pot dealer (Josh Peck of Nickelodeon’s Drake and Josh) — finally drops in theaters worldwide, I expect even more old-school-isms like “dope,” “bomb diggity,” and a childhood favorite, “homey,” to circulate hand-in-hand with the buzz.
Impending ‘90s nostalgia aside, nothing compares to what we have in the present. Our language today is a cut-and-paste screenshot inspired for the most part by Web culture. Keystroke-saving Internet slang is the Nu English, moving from the background, morphing, and gaining mainstream momentum in a matter of weeks. See how “laugh out loud” is no longer just “LOL” or “lol” but “lawl,” “lawlz,” “lul” or “lulz.” (In the same way, no one could have predicted that douche, pwned, moar, groce, and fail would become standard shorthand for a lot of us, as do STFD, STFU, IDGI, OTP, and FTW/FTMFW.) And as Supreme’s digital native Pepe Diokno points out through a YouTube discovery, “Shoes,” the old-fashioned “bitch” is now “betch” — not “biatch,” “beeyotch” or “beeyatch,” but “betch” — betchez.
As author Susie Dent writes in Oxford University Press’ The Language Report, one more area that displays some of the greatest ingenuity and inventiveness in new word creation — making up roughly five percent of new coinages annually — is blending. TomKat, Brangelina, and the Spederlines are so, like, 2005, so do you know Speidi? That’s The Hills’ resident baddies, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, FYI. How about Billary, the tag team political duo of Bill and Hillary Clinton? Well, now you effing do. Mash-up madness has likewise resulted in slacktivism (the desire to do good as long as it involves minimal effort); brandalism (the defacement of buildings by advertising and brand logos); flexecutive (a professional who works flexible hours) and prebuttal (a pre-emptive rebuttal), among others.
Anti-Hipster Jive
One of the main purposes of slang has always been to keep other people guessing,” continues Dent. “Language is a powerful demarcator; with it we can draw an effective boundary around ourselves or our group, developing a shared vocabulary which includes the uninitiated.” With that in mind, however, the converse also holds true: injecting your speech with way too much slang can make everything sound faux. Just ask Diablo Cody.
All through this year’s awards season, Juno’s stripper-turned-screenwriter endured the hype, the acclaim, the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash all because of her Oscar-winning, lingo-filled script. Though lots of people liked it and found it witty, the rest said it smacked of trying too hard. Even Urban Dictionary had something to lob at the 2007 film. Its semi-dissing definition of “honest to blog” goes: “An annoying phrase that hipster-wannabes use to add to the credibility of a statement or check the credibility of another person’s statement. It’s a play on the phrase ‘honest to God’ that refers to the fact that blogs have been reputed as fact checkers in recent years.”
It’s all about believability and New York Post critic called out the Emperor’s New Clothes on Juno. He noted that “the hipster jive that dances across every page of this script (that word is more applicable than story) — about a supercool teen (Ellen Page) who discovers she’s pregnant and decides to have the baby but gives it up for adoption — stumbles a lot, too. Would a 16-year-old girl really drop references to The Goonies and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? I don’t know many 16-year-olds but I’m willing to bet Soupy Sales is not one of their cultural reference points. Screenwriter Diablo Cody is billed as 28 but her references — ‘boss,’ ‘rad’ — sound suspiciously 38-ish; her Juno is also curiously bereft of hip-hop and Web-based slang.”
On the one hand, Juno is a movie and no make-believe character, no matter how much he or she is based on everyday life, ever talks realistically. (See also: The O.C.’s Seth Cohen, Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey.) Then again, by dropping pop culture references way beyond the average Gen Y vocabulary, Diablo Cody drew skepticism towards her real age (and genuine hipsterism, as some critics noted) which shouldn’t have affected Juno but somehow did. In that case, what was overwritten as well as what was supposedly between the lines gave it all away. The whole debacle proves that, without balance and sincerity, slang is just a wall of weird words. When it comes to lexical nuances, after all, what you say and even what you don’t can date you.
