Are you still “bling-blinging it” with your “phat” friends?
Did all your cool points just go down the drizzle, fo’ shizzle?
Don’t distress, old slang happens to good people.
Even the experts–yes, there are slang experts–worry that this facet of pop culture has gotten out of control.
Author Randy Kearse says the media and advertisers gobble up the latest lingo and spit it out to sell themselves to the cool-conscious masses.
“Those words get run to death, but nobody took the time to see what the whole language is made of,” he says.
Kearse is a guardian of urban slang, if you will. To him, slang is not just a quick way to coolness, or a marketing tool–slang is life.
Kearse wrote “Street Talk: Da Official Guide to Hip-Hop & Urban Slanguage,” which he self-published this fall and sells online. The 700-page book, with 10,000 entries, has created such buzz that Kearse is close to cementing a larger distribution deal with Barricade Books for future books to be sold in stores, he says.
“There wasn’t anything at the time that was out there that gave an in-depth interpretation of the whole slang language,” Kearse says. “That’s what I hope ‘Street Talk’ brings to the masses. It’s not just a couple of words: It’s a language.”
The Brooklyn native, who was in prison for federal drug conspiracy from 1992 until August, spent four years working on the book. While in prison, he was exposed to language from across the country, and he wanted to document and interpret it.
Through his research, Kearse found that the most commonly used urban slang comes from four sources: East Coast, West Coast, Southern and undetermined origin.
Slang also is derived from a variety of categories, including prison lingo, drug culture, hip-hop and sexual interaction.
“A lot of time the street and prison culture are more or less intertwined,” he says.
For example, he says, an ex-convict might hear from a renter or employer, “I want to see your paperwork,” meaning they want a background check. But a man may tell a potential lover, “Naw shorty, before we do anything, I have to see your paperwork,” Kearse adds. Translation: Let’s see your HIV test.
“His book, it’s really thorough,” says Aaron Peckham, a Google software engineer who created urbandictionary.com. Peckham depends on people like Kearse who have a keen interest in slang.
Peckham created his slang dictionary for a project at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo–but only intended it to be a parody of dictionary.com. “I never imagined it would be as big as it is today,” says the Sacramento native.
Despite the “urban” title, the site contains words you’d hear from college kids, mall brats–even co-workers.
“I really speak only English spoken by California nerds,” Peckham says. “Hyphy,” for example, is the San Francisco
Bay area aversion of “crunk.” “Stupid, silly, drunk, high and generally out of hand,” he says.
Peckham’s site has amassed more than 1.5 million entries since its birth in December 1999. About 150,000 users visit his site and submit up to 2,000 new words or new definitions per day. A staff of about 5,000 volunteers help cull through the submissions, Peckham says.
“I think it’s kind of funny when people take it seriously,” the 24-year-old says. “The only authority on language is the people speaking it.”
Neither Kearse nor Peckham could reason why some slang words capture the nation’s attention and others don’t. But University of Chicago linguistics professor Salikoko Mufwene says slang comes from networks of “communicators” who want to mimic the “innovative” words of other groups.
Mufwene researches language evolution, including studying how some slang from subcultures becomes dominant terms in the mainstream.
“If it is urban vs. rural, the urban environment stands as a kind of model for the youth in the rural environment,” Mufwene says. Some “aspire to move out of the rural area. One way to do it is to keep up the language in the urban environment.”
This can prompt competing peer groups in the urban culture–or any culture–to drop terms and adopt new slang, because “they don’t want to be confused with nonmembers” of the group, he says.
Mufwene adds that culturally, the influence of slang isn’t a one-way street.
“Say you’re given two musicians, one plays country, the other plays punk rock, and they each coin a new term,” he says. “Is it the country style term that spreads out fast, or the punk rock term? Why? It could be that one phrase is particularly catchier. … Or the images evoked are more vivid.
“It must be something conveyed in a particularly powerful way.”
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plthompson@tribune.com
