Class Acts, and Models to Emulate, regardless of your colour!

Sup, emo and homie: what are kids talking about?

Mark Abley's new book, The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, takes a look at the wild, wacky and sometimes baffling road our language is taking in its evolution. In this excerpt, he asks a class of teenagers to teach him the latest slang.

On a bright October afternoon, I was standing in front of a class of sixteen
and seventeen-year-olds in a small town west of Montreal. Their English teacher had invited me to give a writing workshop in the high school library. The hour was nearing its end when abruptly I switched course. Instead of talking about metaphors and similes, sweet conclusions and dynamite beginnings, I asked each student to jot down a few words or phrases that older people would not understand, and then provide a brief definition for each term. I gave the class no advance warning. The risk was that this impromptu assignment would induce a yawn-filled silence, a retreat into heavy-lidded boredom. But instead the students-especially the girls, I noticed-set about the task with enthusiasm.

"You mean any words?" said a preppy-looking girl in blue. "Even the ones that aren't in the dictionary?"

"Especially the ones that aren't in a dictionary," I replied.

I waited a couple of minutes-time was short-and asked for the results. Arms filled the air. Hands waggled. I'm a reader, a parent, a viewer, a listener; I thought that all together, the students might come up with a dozen words I didn't know. So much for the vanity of age.

Cheddar, said the first, meaning "money, lavish earnings." (I'll give this and all the other definitions in the students' exact words.) He got owned, said another: "rejected, shut down, beat up." On the go, added a third: "it's like going out, but not official." I recognized some of the expressions, of course; even a senior citizen of fifty can comprehend eye candy and loaded, poser and flame. Did these innocent, cool teenagers really believe their generation had invented high? But as I stood there in the sun-dappled library, I realized that the majority of the students' words and phrases left me bemused. What on earth was burninate? Was d-low somehow related to "below," "delay," "J Lo"-or to none of those terms? (Not wanting to keep the meanings secret-to d-low them, that is-I'll suggest that you'd burninate something only if you had the fire-breathing powers of a dragon.) More generally, by what learned or instinctive command had these young people enacted their self-assured takeover of the language?

Before the bell freed them from the joy of learning, the students handed in the slips of paper on which they'd scribbled their definitions. I have them still: scraps torn from notepads and workbooks, a page from a disintegrating paperback, a yellow Post-it note with a smiley at the top. Overlaps were surprisingly rare; just one word-noob, meaning somebody new, ignorant or inexperienced-was defined three times.

Looking at the sixty-six words now, I'm struck by the diversity of their origins. A few emerge from the online world of instant messaging: rofl, for instance, which gathers the initial letters of "rolling on the floor laughing." Others are abbreviations: sup, for instance, originally "What's up?" and now a synonym for "Hi, how are you?" Almost anywhere you go, the power of hip-hop seems unavoidable: surely that's how homie (friend) and foshizzle (I agree) migrated from America's inner cities to a small, waspish town in Quebec. Hip-hop and cyberspace together encouraged the spread of phat, which morphed from "sexy" in the 1960s to "cool, great, wonderful" by the '90s, and which is now widely regarded as an acronym for "pretty hot and tempting"-its original meaning, in short. Drug culture is just as influential; blame or credit it for fatty (an oversized joint), gacked (on speed) and pinner (a small joint). It's unfortunate That's so gay has come to mean "That's stupid, not worth my time." But what could be the origins and adolescent meanings of lag and One and die in a fire?

It was humbling to read an impromptu definition of scene, a word I thought I knew, that deployed a word I couldn't quite pin down-"style (knock-off of emo)." Emo? It was even more humbling for me, a writer, someone whose livelihood depends on the rich and exact use of words, to realize how far the English language had slithered away from my grasp, not for reasons of ethnicity or culture but simply because of time. "But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near," wrote the poet Andrew Marvell in the seventeenth century. It's not a chariot any longer; it's a Dreamliner.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all these expressions are destined to enter the permanent storehouse of English vocabulary. Many of them will be as fleeting as youth itself. Young men and women have always used slang as a weapon to cut their lives free from the nets cast by their elders- didn't I aspire, unsuccessfully, to be a groovy freak? Older people have no reason to try and memorize the throwaway lexicon of the young. But the cascade of teenage slang I faced that afternoon can stand as a symbol of the astonishing rate at which new words are pouring into English. Nobody can control this breakbeat language; nobody can even keep track of it.