“Hey, dude, you wanna chillax at my crib lates? We can pregame before that kegger. Hope it’s not a total sausage-fest like last time.”
Do you know what this sentence means? Most college students would be able to decipher it with ease. Despite what media reports tell us about youth destroying the English language and twisting it into some incomprehensible combination of slang and “text-ese,” it seems many parents and professors might be able to decipher the preceding sentence as well. Slang is definitely spoken almost exclusively by youth, and as soon as an older person adopts it, we chuck it right out the window. But is it really a whole different language?
One of the first examples of college-based slang dates back to the medieval universities of Western Europe. Colleges mandated the use of Latin and punished speakers of the vernacular. College students came up with the term “lupi,” which means “wolves” in Latin, to rip on spies who snitched on students for using the vernacular.
Nowadays, college slang has branched out into all areas of college life. Some slang words acknowledge the sexual freedom that comes with being on your own for the first time. For example, “dormcest” is a romantic or sexual liaison with someone in the same dorm, in which case your roommate would have to be “sexiled,” accomplished by hanging a sock on the doorknob or some other signal you both agree on. When the “bump ‘n’ grind” is over, someone will inevitably have to make the “walk of shame” back to his or her own room.
Building names and landmarks are the most often slangified words on college campuses. “Geographic location is one of the things that is shared by college students,” said Steven Hartman Keiser, assistant professor of English. “You have certain places that everyone needs to go, so terms pop up to refer to them.”
At Marquette, for example, we’ve got “OD” for O’Donnell Hall, “Shuda” for Mashuda Hall, “the Abbey” for Abbotsford Hall, “the Beer Can” for McCormick Hall and “the Been” for Cobeen Hall. Then there’s “Shamu” for the area between Schroeder Hall and the Alumni Memorial Union, “the Wiggle” for the section of 11th Street that curves around Carpenter Tower Hall, “Ange-blows” for the on-campus restaurant Angelo’s and “Toilet Paper Jesus,” a somewhat irreverent name for the statue outside the Jesuit Residence, in which it looks like Jesus has toilet paper billowing celestially around him.
Slang depends on a hierarchical society, according to Tim Machan, another English professor. “One thing you need is a fairly clearly structured society with different classes,” he said. “You need similar arrangement of language varieties.” In other words, you have to have a standard variety of a language before you can develop a non-standard variety.
So why develop a non-standard variety at all? To rebel against “the ‘rents,” of course. “Slang can be a rebellion against the expectation that we will use Standard English in all places and at all times,” according to Anne Curzan and Michael Adams, authors of the book “How English Works.” Much like rebelling against the dress code by ripping holes in our jeans, we rebel against Standard English by using slang.
What does slang do for a society? It draws clearer boundaries separating one group from another, and it serves as a way to define yourself as part of one group and not another. “Slang can be used to wield power and forge solidarity within a group,” wrote Connie Eble, author of the article “American College Slang.” Slang defines one group while excluding another, usually older people.
Furthermore, slang is what linguists call linguistic play.
“A lot of slang sounds fun or is fun to say or is fun to use,” Machan said.
According to Eble, who also wrote “College Slang 101,” many slang words are words already in the lexicon that take on a different meaning. Slang is also formed by adding prefixes and suffixes, putting words together, shortening words, forming acronyms, making onomatopoeia, rhyming and borrowing from African-American English, among other methods.
Sex and drinking have inspired the greatest number of slang terms.
“Often slang vocabulary is highly developed in areas that are taboo for the general culture,” Eble said.
There are a whole slew of words that exist solely to trash-talk the appearance of another person. For instance, the word “butterface” describes a chick with a hot body and a “fugly” face. A recent favorite, the “muffin top” is the roll of flesh that bulges over the waistband of too-tight, low-riser pants.
“Manscaping” is the act of removing excess body hair, via waxing or shaving — on a guy. Other slang terms carrying a “man-” prefix include, “manorexia,” “mandals,” “manpris” and “man crush,” which, respectively, can be used to talk about a skinny guy, male sandals, a pair of capris worn by a guy — and the respect and admiration one man develops for another.
A menagerie of different terms exist for expressing someone’s intoxicated state — wasted, schwasted, crunk, baked, fried, toasted, smashed, tipsy, hammered, plastered, stoned and trashed, to name a few — not to mention the various names concocted for alcohol and various drugs themselves. If you want, you can “pre-game” before a “kegger,” where you’ll “double-fist” jungle juice and drunk dial your “FWB” — friend with benefits. These days you can also drunk text, drunk MySpace or drunk Facebook your “homeskillets.”
What is it that makes the language of college students unique? Partly, it’s the unique atmosphere. Nowhere else is there a conglomeration of so many people, with so much in common, in such close quarters.
“Anywhere you get people together doing the same thing, like studying at the university level, there grows a lexicon around the activity that happens,” Hartman Keiser said.
We all go to class together, live together, party together and go to intramural innertube water polo practice (or “whatev”) together. Because of these shared experiences, the need for new words to describe these experiences arises.
Another factor in the uniqueness of campus lingo is the diversity of the students. “Within a place like Marquette you’ve got 8,000 undergraduates alone (who are) all coming from different places,” Hartman Keiser said.
How many times have you heard people argue the appropriate pronunciation of “bag”? And then there are Facebook groups defending the dignity of carbonated beverages, such as “If By Soda, You Mean Pop, Bitch.” A college campus is a veritable linguistic melting pot.
Slang is attractive to college students because we work hard to build in-group solidarity with our peers, while asserting independence from our parents.
According to Eble, “Slang allows college students to endure and enjoy together that twilight zone between adolescence and adulthood.” Not only are we physically independent from our parents, we’re also becoming more linguistically independent.
After we graduate from college and become the older people we so desperately try to separate ourselves from, our youth-centered slang slowly fades away. Often it is replaced with new slang from our workplaces or other social groups we join upon leaving the ol’ alma mater. This switching on and off of slang is what differentiates slang from dialect. According to Machan, slang is used self-consciously and purposefully, while a dialect flows naturally at all times.
College students have often gotten a bad reputation for ruining the English language. “The idea that college students are destroying the language is a very old one,” Machan said. As far back as the 1880s, the general public accused students of mangling the dictionary with slang.
Technology also shares the burden of blame for the alleged decline of the English language. Baffled older people repeatedly shake their heads in confusion at “text-ese” such as, LOL, BRB and WTF, and some fear these acronyms will replace actual words in spoken English. So is your iPhone really the beginning of the end?
“The idea that the Internet or text messaging or any of that is the end of civilization and the end of language is a bunch of hooey,” Machan said.
Hartman Keiser concurs. “I think the effect on the English language of texting and the Internet is pretty superficial,” he said. “Just a few terms, the possibility of some alternate spellings — pretty minor stuff.”
And even if acronyms do begin to replace actual words, what’s the big deal? Wouldn’t others rather hear “WTF” than the words this acronym actually stands for?
Crispin Thurlow, author of the article “From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media,” points out that acronyms already exist in the lexicon.
“What of comparable examples of less comment-worthy acronyms such as ASAP, AKA, BTW, AWOL?” Thurlow said. Plus, texting abbreviations are mainly used ironically in spoken English. People who say “LOL” instead of actually laughing when they find something hilarious are, in a sense, making fun of those who actually use the term. “I think that texting terminology is likely to stick around with a sort of ironic, nudge-nudge, ‘I’m being corny’ idea,” Hartman Keiser said.
Panicked scholars need not worry because e-mailing and texting have their own self-contained varieties of language use that don’t affect spoken English or formally written papers.
“I don’t think anyone would use text messaging words to write a class paper,” Machan said. “It’s not going to wander into other areas of usage.”
Use of “text-ese” has a time and a place, and young people understand that. A student can make the choice to use “sum” instead of “some” or “2gether” instead of “together” in a lab report, but then again, that student also has the choice to use swear words or write in all caps or not do the assignment at all. Just because text language exists doesn’t mean it will permeate formal language.
“I think that’s something that a lot of the hysterics who get worried about language in the world falling apart don’t get,” Machan said. “They really don’t get that human beings have brains and understand things like context.”
Some people say language is ruined, but the fact is language is constantly changing. “It’s pretty easy to see change as somehow a bad thing,” Hartman Keiser said. “We want to believe that the things that are happening in our generation have never happened before or that things are happening in ways that no one has experienced before.”
Perhaps the only thing technology has done to significantly change language is to create new ways in which to use language and to spread language around the world.
“What might be changing the English language…is the fact that so many people are speaking it,” Hartman Keiser said. “There are several hundred million native speakers of English and 3 billion non-native speakers of English around the world.”
Now that is baller.