Archive for Slang

Kiddo slang at warp speed

"Mewing, Beta Maxing, Gigachad, Baddie: Parents Are Drowning in New Lingo", Katherine Bindley, WSJ (2/5/25)

Slang is sprouting at a dizzying speed, leaving adults constantly unsure if they’re being insulted; ‘Omega is like the lowest rate you can get’

The article includes many examples of parents from diverse backgrounds and various locations confronting this flood of juvenile jargon.  Here I give only one instance:

Cecilia Hermawan has text chains going with other parents to stay up to speed on the words and phrases catching on among their children. Still, the Boston-area resident was taken aback after hearing the word “mewing” come out of her 9-year-old’s mouth.

“I didn’t know what it meant so I had to Google it, and I had to ask my friend Emily to reference check,” said Hermawan, 41.

The startup founder was relieved her daughter and her friend were referring to a type of facial exercise and not something inappropriate. “You look at yourself in the mirror and you mew,” she said. “It’s supposed to enhance your jawline.”

Incidentally, out of the half a dozen or so cases of confused guardians cited by Bindley, two are identified as a "startup founder", a designation I had heard of before and had an idea of what it meant, but recognized it as representing a certain type of person who is full of aspiration and audacity.  Maybe the environment and mentality fostered by such individuals would be conducive to speedily mutating hip parlance on the part of their offspring.

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Sino-American diplomatic slang in the mid-70s

[This is a guest post by Don Keyser]

A true tale from nearly a half century ago … prompted by reading the mox nix posting to LL

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My first of three Beijing postings was 1976-78 to the U.S. Liaison Office.  USLO was tiny — 25 total personnel (9 "substantive" [Chief, USLO; Deputy Chief, USLO; POL-3; ECON-3; Agricultural Attaché], the remainder a visa officer and secretaries, administrative support personnel, security officers, and communicators).  Hence when USLO hosted a reception for a visiting US delegation or for another occasion, most of the staff attended.
 
Our POL secretary was bright, personable and capable.  She had an M.A. So she was an asset at the receptions. 

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"A fancy way to say 'fancy'"

I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods.  It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).

[*I absolutely love that Italian word!  So much depends on the intonation with which you say it.  A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:

You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms. 

In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end.  To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”

Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)

It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]

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Body wash

The bottle of body wash affixed to the wall of the shower in the Cheyenne hotel where I'm staying is labeled in French as "Savon Liquide pour le Corps".

English "body wash" is two words consisting of eight letters.  "Savon Liquide pour le Corps" is five words consisting of twenty-three letters.

We've discussed the phenomenon of French verbosity versus English brevity before.  See  "The genius and logic of French and English" 4/11/23) and "French vs. English" (8/2/15) — also about "soap".

Surely, I thought, the French do not have to be that loquacious just to say something so simple as "body wash".

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Old, new, and mixed Cantonese colloquialisms

I dislike calling non-Standard Mandarin Sinitic language expressions "slang" (almost as much as I am dismayed when people call Sinitic topolects dialects — we've been through that countless times).  Others may differ, but in my idiolect, "slang" is pejorative, and I distinguish "slang" from "argot; jargon; lingo; etc.", which — for me — denote particularization of occupation, not crudeness or cursing, although they may sometimes be associated with lower social levels.

slang

1756, meaning "special vocabulary of tramps or thieves", origin unknown. Possibly derived from a North Germanic source, related to Norwegian Nynorsk slengenamn (nickname), slengja kjeften (to abuse verbally, literally to sling one's jaw), related to Icelandic slengja (to sling, throw, hurl), Old Norse slyngva (to sling). Not believed to be connected with language or lingo.

(Wiktionary)

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Not quite "CLOTHING & SHOES"

Note from François Lang:  "This is not photoshopped. I took this photo this afternoon in Rockville MD."

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Slap varieties

Sunny Jhatti wrote to me: "I didn't know what 'pimp slap' meant till I saw this."

After witnessing her astonishing diatribe, Conal Boyce said:

I felt like I needed to take a shower.

(Adding insult to injury, google failed to elucidate 'Skims' for me. Had to look elsewhere to get an inkling of what that recurrent theme was about.)

I found the presenter's self-introduction here. She even has her own YouTube channel and other social media platforms.  Her handle is Genevieve Akal.  She is a Gnostic Priestess and Nun.  From the pieties expressed on her homepage, I would never have imagined that she could indulge in such vile vitriol.

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AI and slang

As someone who is particularly fond of and sensitive to vernacular (I didn't say "vulgar"), I knew it was only a matter of time before this came up.  Below is a stimulating article about the seeming inability of ChatGPT and LLMs to grasp slang as well as they do common language.  Every paragraph, indeed every sentence, is thought-provoking.  I encourage readers to turn to the original publication if they want more of what I have excerpted below.

Why AI Doesn’t Get Slang
And why that’s a good thing

By Caleb Madison
The Atlantic (October 28, 2023

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Slang is born in the margins. In its early form, the word itself, slang, referred to a narrow strip of land between larger properties. During England’s transition from the rigid castes of feudalism to the competitive free market of capitalism, across the 14th to 17th centuries, the privatization of open farmland displaced countless people without inherited connection to the landed elite. This shift pushed people into small corridors between the recently bounded properties.

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Excuse my French

The following article is presented in typical New Yorker cartoon style, but I've retyped the text so that it will take up less space, allowing me to expatiate on the origin and meaning of the key phrase in the title.

Pardon My French: A Guide to French Colloquialisms

A visual "guide" to speaking and thinking like a French person

By Zoé Albert, New Yorker (July 14, 2023)

First the colloquial expression in French, then a literal word for word translation, then the idiomatic meaning:

tomber dans les pommes

"to fall in the apples"

to faint

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Crappy metaphor: slippers that make you feel like you're stepping on shit

Sign on the elevator doors of a Taipei department store:

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Laowai (the Old Furriner) trolls the CCP

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Fake F*ck

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Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 5

Dave Thomas recently watched a Chinese movie with a liberal sprinkling (more than fifty instances) of alphabet letters substituting for Chinese characters in the closed captions.  The title of the movie is "Yǒng bù huítóu 永不回頭" ("Never Back Off" [official English title]; "Never Look Back").  Here's a small selection of the partially alphabetized expressions:

bié B wǒ 别B我 | B = bī 逼 || "don't force / push me"

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