If Slang Is Not a Sin

By LANCE MORROW

The 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.

The '60s-bred clergyman, especially the Episcopalian, is for some reason a wondrous curator of the lingo. He ascends his pulpit. "God doesn't want you on a guilt trip" he begins, inspired. "God's not into guilt. Bad vibes! He knows where you're coming from. God says, 'Guilt, that's a bummer.,' The Lord can be pretty far out about these things, you know." He goes into a wild fugue of nostalgia: "Sock it to me! Outasight! Right on!"

But 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 the language today."

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 to the max! Fer shirr!"

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.

An inventory of American slang now, however, can be somewhat disappointing. Slang today seems to lack the playful energy and defiant self-confidence that can send language darting out to make raffish back-alley metaphorical connections and shrewdly teasing inductive games of synonym.

Examine one fairly new item: airhead. It means, of course, a brainless person, someone given to stupid behavior and opinions. But it is a vacuous, dispiriting little effort. The word has no invective force or metaphorical charm. When slang settles for the drearily literal (airhead equals empty head), it is too tired to keep up with the good stuff.

Much new slang originates with people who have to be in by 8. Junior high and even grade school are unexpectedly productive sources. Sometimes children simply take ordinary words and hold them up to the light at a slightly different angle, an old trick of slang. The ten-year-old will pronounce something "excellent" in the brisk, earnest manner of an Army colonel who has just inspected his regiment. (Primo means the same thing.) The movie E. T. has contributed penis breath, an aggressively weird phrase in perfect harmony with the aggressively weird psyche of the eight-year-old. In Minnesota, they say, for weird. Bogus is an ordinary, though slightly out-of-the-way word that has been recommissioned as youth slang that means fraudulent or simply second-rate or silly. Bogus is a different shading of lame. Something that is easy is cinchy. Overexcited? One is blowing a hype.

The young, as always, use slang as an instrument to define status, to wave to peers and even to discipline reality. A real jerk may be a nerkey, a combination of nerd and turkey. Is something gnarly? That may be good or bad. But if it is mega-gnarly, that is excellent. One may leave a sorority house at U.C.L.A. to mow a burger. Slang has less ideological content now than it had in the '60s. Still, it sometimes arises, like humor, from apprehension. High school students say, "That English test really nuked me." On the other hand, in black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., if you had a good time at a party, you dropped the bomb.

The old '50s frat-house leer is evident in today's collegiate slang. To get naked means to have a good time, whether or not sex is involved. (That is a new shortened form of the get-drunk-and-get-naked party, which collegians fantasized about 20 years ago.) At Michigan State University, one who is vomiting is driving the bus, a reference to the toilet seat and the wretch's need to hang on to it. Sckacks means ugly. A two-bagger is a girl who requires exactly that to cover her ugliness. Young women, of course, retaliate. At breakfast in Bates Hall at Wellesley, they wonder, "Why bother with a guy if he doesn't make your teeth fall out?" Time to book means time to leave, which can also be time to bail. None of this is exactly brilliant. Slang is sometimes merely a conspiracy of airheads.

American slang is fed by many tributaries. Feminists are busy networking--the liberated version of using the old-boy network. Cops, as sardonic with language as criminals are, refer to a gunshot wound in the head as a serious headache. Drug users have their codes, but they seem to have lost some of their glamour. Certain drugs have a fatality about them that cannot be concealed in jaunty language. The comedian Richard Pryor introduced the outer world to freebasing a couple of years ago, and John Belushi died after he speed-balled (mixed heroin and cocaine). Punk language has made a couple of its disarmingly nasty contributions: sleaze (as in, "There was a lot of sleaze at the party," meaning much of the transcendentally rotten) has passed from the homosexual vocabulary into punk, and is headed for mainstream English.

The Pentagon speaks of the power curve, meaning the direction in which things are tending. Employees at McDonald's describe their specialized burnout as being burgered-out. Homosexuals possess a decadently rich special vocabulary that is on the whole inaccessible to breeders (heterosexuals).

Television has developed an elaborate jargon that has possibilities as slang. Voiceover, segue, intro and out of sync have been part of the more general language for a long time. Now there is the out-tro, the stand-up spiel at the end of a news reporter's segment. A vividly cynical new item of TV news jargon is bang-bang, meaning the kind of film coverage that TV reporters must have in order to get their reports from El Salvador or the Middle East onto the evening news.

Black slang may not be quite as strong as it was in the '60s. That may mean either that black slang is less productive than before or that it is more successful at remaining exclusive and secret.

Two expressions that have popped up this summer: serious as a heart attack and that's Kool and the Gang. The second is a reference to a popular musical group and a little flourish added to the ancient that's cool.

The richest new territory for slang is computer technology. That is unexpected. Slang is usually thought of as a kind of casual conversation in the street, not as a dialogue between the human brain and a machine. Those who go mountaineering up the interface, however, are developing a wonderfully recondite vocabulary. Hackers (computer fanatics) at M.I.T. and Stanford maintain a Hacker's Dictionary to keep their common working language accessible to one another. Input and output have long since entered the wider language. So have software and hardware. The human brain in some circles is now referred to as wetware. When a computer goes down, of course, it crashes. Menu, meaning a computer's directory of functions, is turning up now as noun and verb, as in "Let me menu my schedule and I'll get back to you about lunch."

In the Hacker's Dictionary, one finds gronk (a verb that means to become unusable, as in "the monitor gronked"), gweep (one who spends unusually long periods of time hacking), cuspy (anything that is exceptionally good or performs its functions exceptionally well), dink (to modify in some small way so as to produce large or catastrophic results), bag biter (equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently) and deadlock (a situation wherein two or more processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for the other to do something. This is the electronic equivalent of gridlock, a lovely, virtually perfect word that describes automobile traffic paralyzed both ways through an intersection). The hacker's lexicon is endless and weirdly witty, and inspiring in a peculiar way: the human language is caught there precisely in the act of improvisation as it moves through a strange new country. The mind is making itself at home in the mysteries and possibilities of the machines.

A word, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "is the skin of a living thought." The flesh of slang is a little weaker than usual now. Why? For several reasons. Perhaps slang follows the economy and now finds itself a bit recessed.

Tribes make slang, and the old tribes are dissolving. Slang has always been the decoration and camouflage of nervous subgroups: youth, blacks, homosexuals, minorities, pickpockets, small tribes using language as solidarity against the big tribes. Slang proclaims one's specialness and conceals one's secrets. Perhaps the slang of today seems a bit faded-because we still live in an aftermath of the '60s, the great revolt of the tribes. The special-interest slangs generated then were interminably publicized. Like the beads and the Afros and gestures and costumes and theatrical rages, slang became an ingredient of the national mixed-media pageant. Now, with more depressingly important things to do (earn a living, for example), Americans may feel a sense of cultural lull.

As the University of Cincinnati's William Lasher remarks, "Slang doesn't get written down, so it doesn't endure. If you do write it down, it gets into the language, and stops being slang." In a maniacally open electronic society, the news and entertainment industries sift hungrily through the culture searching for color, anecdote, personality, uniqueness and, of course, slang. All these items instantly become part of the show. Slang is wonderful entertainment. But its half-life is shorter now. Good slang gets commercial in a hurry, like certain country-music singers.

There may be a deeper reason for the relative decline of slang. Standard English is losing prestige and even legitimacy. Therefore, deviations from the "correct" also lose some of their force. Slang forfeits a little of its renegade quality, its outlaw savor. If slang is no longer a kind of sin, it cannot be as much fun as it once was.

--By Lance Morrow

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