Slang
I was chatting with some new friends from Paris after the Pride Parade in NYC and somehow the topic of slang came up. From what I remember, the Parisians were showing us pictures they had taken and one was of a large sign that said, “oof.” While funny on its own, apparently “oof” means “crazy” in Parisian slang. You see, the French jam pack their words with useless letters that get ignored or forgotten, because the French are actually that aloof, but these extra letters and their liquid pronunciation gives the French language an ability to sort of slosh back and fourth. What I’m trying to say is that a good deal of French slang involves pronouncing words in reverse, such as “oof” which is the reverse of “fou,” which as you may have guessed is also French for crazy. This fact got me thinking and I was able to come up with at least two other examples of slang formation that don’t exist in American English.
The Brits, particularly Londoners, have their own clever way to make rapid-fire slang. Before he married Madonna, Guy Richie made a show case of it in his films, particularly Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels. Observe:
The whole movie is packed with glorious verbal gymnastics like that. From what I can tell, much like the French slang, the English trick works on contextual audio cues: your brain fills in the correct word even though what it hears is technically nonsense. The rhyme is close enough that it works “pub”= “nuclear sub” and “chest” = “birds nest” etc.
Chinese slang, or at least the example I have hear, also uses sound similarity, but here relies on the fact that simply saying a word in a different tone (rising, falling, flat, etc.) changes the meaning. As a tonal language, Chinese words that seem utterly unrelated, such as horse, mother, and a sound that indicates a question, are all the same word “ma.” All that changes is how you say it. For example, “si” means the number “four” if said one way and “death” if said another, thus giving the number four a close association with death, thereby making it unlucky. Given the Chinese government’s over-eagerness with the big black marker of censorship, slang has become a great way to get a message out through nonsense, like this video (check the captions):
Catchy right? Slang is a degradation of the language that first requires something of a mastery of it. Even if it’s unintentional, the best slang uses the tropes of the tongue it’s altering to do so. Slang rebellion from within. Or it’s some sort of mutation of the alien virus from outer space.
If I knew any hip slang, I’d use it right now in a cool way to sign off this post, but I’m a sheltered nerd, so I’ll just be going now.
Pop Transhumanism | Kyle Munkittrick | 
July 1, 2009 10:19 am
