Slanguage TV

For everyone out there who has long harbored a desire to test his or her ability to decipher hippie slang as read by a German teenager, you're welcome.

Coming Up for Air

(Cue Thus Spake Zarathustra from 2001)

We, and by we, I mean I have emerged from a nearly two-year slumber not unlike the mighty cicadas which are now swarming over the disgusted citizenry of suburban Chicago. Of course, we (I) only slept for two years, while they hibernate for seventeen, but I am told they do that for reasons that relate to prime numbers, and two is a prime number as well, so quit being so quick to judge.

Many of our loyal readership is likely wondering what happened? Where have they been? What new trend-words or "twerds" have we been missing out on without the staff of Slanguage to hold our hand daintily like a southern gentlemen guiding us past somebody's darling and assuring us that the terrible conflagration would soon be at an end?

Cast your minds back, back as far as September 20th, 2005, a Tuesday, my fourth favourite day of the week (for obvious reasons). Fred and I were packing our belongings into an old ruck-sack in preparation for our upcoming trip to the Annual Conference on Post-Modern Fiction sponsored by the editorial board of Teen People and held in Uppsala, Sweden. As we bickered playfully over how David Foster Wallace would react if Fred wore his favorite Old Navy blazer to the Auster Cotillion, neither of us knew what adventure, or tragedy, lay ahead... By tragedy, I am referring to how Fred died. I'm not sure if that was clear.

To be continued...

Taking Over

We won't speak about what happened to Fred. We will not discuss the multiple burns he must have sustained, or the inevitable damage to his liver. We will not hypothesize about the severed ring finger that was mailed to us. We will certainly not discuss the bloody class ring that came with it. We will avoid, at all costs, mention of the forceps, the rusted scythe, the mason jar, the ballpoint pen, the "aggie," the protractor, the glue stick, the Lou Rawls commemorative plate, or the number 2 pencil. It's simply not appropriate for this forum.

What is appropriate is my current obsession: DJ Khaled's "We Takin' Over."


There are many angles to approach this song from: you could examine how DJ Khaled, a man completely devoid of talent (other than grimacing into a fisheye lens) has convinced the best rappers of the moment to appear on a track and in a video with him. You could look into Fat Joe's insistence that every one of his verses be references to other, more famous rap verses. Or you could take the easy route and make fun of Rick Ross. However, I'm going to devote this post to simply trying to figure out what the fuck the increasingly untouchable Lil Wayne is actually saying.

Half the verse is plain jane: "I have more jewels than your jeweler," "I stay on track like a box of Pumas," etc. The other half is completely confusing (especially the syncopated line immediately preceding the beat coming back in, it sounds vaguely like "I like my spine, east to please.") Now, you think it'd be easy to look that up on the internet. Not so. Because it's technically illegal to publish lyrics without obtaining permission, the websites that ultimately DO publish lyrics are pretty lame and are more likely to fire a shotgun blast of pop-up ads in your face than give you accurate Lil Wayne information. As such, various sites had various interpretations on that one crucial line. Here are a few:

A. "And I like, my spite ease the peak"

B. "And I like my Sprite easter pink"

C. "And, I'm like my spirit easter pink"

As it turns out, B is almost definitely the correct answer. The ever reliable urbandictionary.com defines "Easter Pink Sprite" as "Blood and cocaine mixed." I also saw it elsewhere as referring to Codeine, or Codeine and Sprite mixed. Delish, all around.

Still, the various interpretations made for some enjoyable reading. Given the absence of a definitive source (most rap lyrics are not reprinted in the liner notes), these ungoverned, slapdash lyric databases are the only source of information vis a vis Lil Wayne's vernacular hijinks. As such, I'll be revisiting them in the days ahead, noting discrepancies, poking fun, and bringing you the best recipes for Easter Pink Sprite.

p.s. I'm not the only one who was curious about that line. For an enjoyable discussion on the subject, peep: http://forums.sohh.com/showthread.php?t=856521

A New Word Dawns

We have all been there. Sitting in class while working on our doctoral thesis in psycho-linguistics covering the inhibitory mechanisms inherit in the brains motor-ambulatory devlopment when exposed to trip-hop beats. Whilst about to finish out the complex equation calculating the heat of the beat to the x factor of the groove* your eye catches on a young fillie or fillet across the way. Suddenly all work ceases. Like a well orchestrated trip hop beat bassed into the aural brain nodes, the sight and, in some rare cases, smell of this object renders all other activity impossible and undesireable.

While the situation is not in itself new, it has for too long lacked something. Far be it from us, the good people of Slanguage, LL.P. to steal Rich Little's gig, but frankly this one was too easy. Seriously, one of the interns came up with it in a footnote to a larger study on probabilities on the name of the new Brit-Fed offspring. But like the poor bastard (in the vulgar, not technical sense) child of Britney, from humble origins can come great things. Well actually, this is indirect variance to that situation, in which from ridiculously ostentatious and white-trashy origins nothing but a lifetime of shame and an embarassment of both riches and embarassments will come. Without further ado...

Distractive (di-strak' tiv), adj. distractivating, distractivation. Slang, shortly to be common use. 1. Possessing the qualities of attraction, charm, or good looks in such abundance that it makes those viewing the object in question unable to concentrate or retain focus on anything aside from the object: Alec, I'm sorry I am such a distractive guy, but I can't help my killer bod.

Etym. [Come on seriously, I just slapped together attractive and distracting, I'm not going to write out the etymology of both of those words.]

* (For those interested, the equation thus completed informs us the heat of the beat is in direct relation to the smoove of the groove.)

In Translation

Three popular phrases run through several iterations of an automatic language translator.
"It takes one to know one." (English - Russian - English - Portuguese - German - English) - End is requested, in order to know this to it.

"Drop it like it's hot." (English - Greek - French - Greek - English) - The fall this as she is boiling hot.

"I ain't no hollaback girl." (English - Japanese - English - Korean - English) - The girl whom the shout does not put at the outside.

What's the Word?

Where: Indeterminate email correspondence.
When: 8/23/05
The Perps: Undisclosed.
The Slang: "That sounds hecka fun."
Analysis: Anyone who has spent anytime in California or around people from said California should be well-versed in the adverb "hella." While some colleagues at Slanguage may not take offense at the term, other folks here, your humble contributer included, have always found themsleves mildly repelled and oddly sweaty whenever the two-syllable word spewed from a bleach-blond head lazily modifying a verb or adjective. Something about the simple transition from "hella" to "hecka" intrigued and delighted us. Do we enjoy that it somehow undermines the original expression? Perhaps. Regardless. Spread the word far and wide. Hecka is hecka better than hella.

Overheard

Where: Virgin Megastore on Union Square, New York, NY.
When: 7/17/05 (This past Sunday)
The Perps: A few guys, hustling a few girls.
The Slang: "Lemme get your math," as in "Let me get your number."
Analysis: This may already be in common usage, but it's the first time we've heard it, and we like it. "Can I get your digits?" is yesterday's news (and plus, it could be interpreted as "can I get your fingers and toes?") and while "Can I get your number?" will never die (until we all communicate by mindbeam), it's good to have a handy alternative.
Just for Fun: The guys also insisted that the girls check out their profiles on MySpace. No joke.

With reporting by A. Peck

Surviving Survivor

Has anyone ever really listened to the lyrics of that Destiny's Child song, "Survivor"? Has Destiny's Child? I can't imagine Beyonce, in good conscience, green-lighting a lyric as bizarre as "I'm not gonna dis you on the internet/cause my mama taught me better than that." One imagines an apron-clad mother full of folkish wisdom clucking her tongue at a pint-sized Destiny's Child: "Have you girls been dissing people on the internet?"

The real weirdness, however, isn't in the bridges, it's in the verses. For those who can't remember or never paid attention in the first place, they're a litany of claims that all follow the basic pattern of "You thought this would happen when we broke up/In fact, the opposite happened." It starts off innocently enough, with lyrics like "You thought that I'd be weak without you/but I'm stronger" and "Thought I wouldn't grow without you/but I'm wiser." Then, right before the hands-in-the-air chorus, it takes a dangerous turn for the overly specific: "Thought I'd be stressed without you/but I'm chillin." After the chorus, all hell breaks loose: "Thought I couldn't see without you/perfect vision," and "Thought I couldn't breathe without you/I'm inhalin'." What?

We would have loved to sit in on the lyric writing session, undoubtedly a jazzy meeting in which all present eagerly shouted out suggestions. "Ooh ooh! Check this: 'Thought I'd hungry without you/but I'm chowin'!!'" "I got one!!! 'Thought I'd be knifin' without you/but I'm forkin''"

Still, the song is great. Only a churl wouldn't admit that.

Shooting From the Hip

Hendrik Hertzberg's Politics is one of those books that's both a great pleasure to own and to read. To own because, with a seven hundred-page girth and an imposing title, it fills out a bookshelf nicely, and because purchase includes the kick of being able to say you just "bought the Hertzberg book." (Go on, try saying it out loud. A blast, no?) It's a pleasure to read because, well, it's just a lot of fun. Politics also holds the unique distinction of being the kind of book we here at Slanguage would normally deem irrelevant for discussion in the halls of this hallowed blog. There's narry a "motherfuck," "biatch," or "hifey" within. There is, however, an essay on Yuppies (written in 1988, when the phenomenon was at its cultural zenith) that strikes a Slanguage-worthy chord.

One of H.H.'s observations is how slippery the word "Yuppie" was; you could use it to describe both groups and individuals, but no one (or at least, very few) would pin it to themselves. There's no "I" in "Yuppie." Nor, apparently, is there an "I" in "Hipster." I won't go into the etymology of the term (I've heard multiple explanations, from low-slung jeans to North African origins), and defining the word acutely is difficult to do in blog post length. But I think it's worth talking about hipster shame.

Recently I was having a conversation with someone who, no matter how shallow you cast your net, could be described as a Hipster. To preserve anonymity, I won't go into too many specifics, but he plays in a rock band, has a jagged haircut, wears spandex-tight jeans, and says "rad" a lot. Yet, throughout our conversation, he continually referred disparagingly to a person he didn't like as "just this huge hipster." By the same token, once, while hanging out with some friends of friends, I was accused of being a hipster because I knew the name of the lead singer of the Strokes. So hipsterism is relative, natch. The only absolute is that you don't want to be one.

Why not? The values one might casually associate with hipsterness (creativity, independence, self-expression) are admired, if not fetishized, by our generation. Same, it could be said, of the Yuppies and the generation coming of age in the eighties. Hertzberginator talks about how the aura of money around the Y word was at odds with the financial realities of the eighties. That no one really had as much money as it seemed like, and the Yuppie notion that you could buy into a more desirable social bracket was, for the vast majority of Americans, untrue. Thus, the term went from a descriptive to a sneer.

The same can't be said of "hipster." Though "trust fund" and "hipster" are not total strangers, the negative connotation of the word doesn't have its roots in class. Rather, it draws its damning power from a collective fear of being perceived as insincere. Denouncing someone as a hipster is the same as denouncing them as being superficial; Hipsters are in it for the wrong reasons. "It" may be anything from wearing tight jeans to liking a certain movie, but what's definite is that their intentions are shallow.

Every generation has had its fascination with cultural sincerity (I remember in seventh grade, I bought a skateboard but was paranoid about riding in public, lest I come across someone who would call me a "poser"), but it seems particularly rampant now, which makes sense: the lines between what's genuine and grassroots and what's hopelessly commodified are increasingly bleary. Partially because the big bad media is so good at finding the sincere and bringing it to light, partially because the underground has to make money, and even partially because hopelessly commodified can be a fresh, genuine statement of sorts. Indie-level bands are providing music for McDonalds commercials. Does that take away from their credibility? Does it add to it? Is the question of credibility even relevant?

My point is: "Hipster" is the product of this confusion. It's a way of paring off those who come up with the wrong answers to these difficult questions, or even those who spend time answering the questions at all. If you're truly genuine, you just do what feels right, right? And in this fashion, the negative connotation of "Hipster" quickly becomes an annoyingly circuitous dilemma, whereby those seeking to avoid it end up becoming it. We can only hope the term suffers the same fate as "Yuppie": slow death by overexposure. Consider this posting a crucial step in the process.

Drinking the Flavour Aid

Members of our readership (which has currently surpassed 17,000 unique hits a day!) who follow politics cannot help but have heard the term "Drinking the Kool-Aid." A fellow travel in the world of cyberlinguistics defines the term as such, "To become a firm believer in something; to accept an argument or philosophy wholeheartedly or blindly." We'll go with that more or less.

The term which draws its origins from the 1978 Jonestown massacre in which 900 cult members committed suicide by ingesting cyanide laced Flavor Aid. That's right. Flavor Aid. Sucks to be Kool-Aid, huh? OHHHH YEAH.

(Ir)Regardless, it occured to us that the phrase "Drinking the Kool-Aid" opens up a whole new field of possible phraseology play marrying beverages of choice with personal and psychosomatic behavior. After careful research, we have the following findings:

Drinking the Raspberry Yoo-hoo: One who in attempts to please all becomes finicky in personal and professional relationships, a well-meaning two-face.

Drinking the Schwepps Ginger Ale: One who puts on aires of sophistication and superiority whether warranted or not.

Drinking the Continental Cola: One who engages in extreme spend-thrift behavior, to the embarassment of his or her friends and colleagues.

Drinking the Natural Light or Natty Light; (Regional variation, Drinking the Beast, Drinking the Milwaukee's Best): One who lacks culture or refinement and revels in it.

Drinking the Cheerwine: One who is absolutely awesome, the pinnacle of glaze.