SIMPLY SLANG – ENGLISH IS WACK

If you listen to any teen nowadays, you will usually hear the word “wack” mentioned at least once or twice within the first 5 minutes. Today’s kids use it to describe anything that is uncool, bad, crazy, idiotic, inferior or strange. The overuse of the word “wack” emerged in the hip-hop slang of the 1980s, becoming a widely used term within that cultural context.

Most adults I know today use what I refer to as “colloquialized slang”, which takes on just as many meanings. A lot of them were derived from words used in our past. When I’m talking about the past, I mean at least 50 to 100 years ago.

Most of today’s teens are what are referred to as “Gen Z”. They have parents who were born in the generations now known as “Gen X” and “Millenials”… those born from 1965 into the 1990’s. These kids were shaped by growing up in a period of significant social and technological change, including economic shifts, the rise of home computing, and the AIDS epidemic. They also grew up with the internet, social media, and smartphones, making them inherently digital. 

These Gen Z kids use a lot of different words to communicate, some of which I had to really study to understand. Words like “ate” which means to do something good, “sup” meaning what’s new, “bussin” meaning that’s tasty, “drip” meaning that’s a great outfit, “lit” meaning someone with lots of energy, and “tea” meaning the latest gossip or news.

Gen Xers often grew up as “latchkey kids” in single-parent households, leading to increased self-sufficiency, thus their language took on a whole new meaning within their peer group.

I was a Baby Boomer, or as some older folks might refer to as part of the ” Jones Generation”. I came of age during a period of economic difficulty and disillusionment. After the war, when things were rough for everyone, some people began to “dig themselves out” of their economic depression and started making a better life for themselves and their families. Slang words became popular at this time in history. I’ll give you a taste of some of the “slang” we sharpened our teeth on growing up, starting with the Joneses.

There was a saying back then that everyone had to “keep up with the Joneses”. It meant trying to impress your neighbors by having the newest of everything, including cars and houses. My thought was to ask the question, “Were these Joneses such exceptional people that everyone wanted to imitate them? What if, in reality, they are awful people with lots of sicko perversions? They could have been past murderers or thieves and are pretending to be upstanding citizens. I mean, just because Mr. Jones got a brand new 1957 Edsel convertible doesn’t mean that his family was cooler than ours. After all, we had “indoor plumbing” instead of an outhouse. FYI… my family owned a pink Edsel station wagon.

So in life, you had to be happy to be successful. People claimed that they were “Happy as a clam”. I wanted to know, if all clams are really happy? Did anyone ever have an in-depth talk with them to determine the extent of their current jocular attitude? What if they had a really rough day way down there on the ocean floor, scrounging around for fish morsels for hours on end, and went back into their clam beds hungry?

Okay… who made the decision to make Gus “gloomy”? Was it something he said or did to piss someone off? Seems like he got a raw deal here. Why couldn’t there be a gloomy Gertrude or gloomy Glinda? I’m sure if you gave Gus another chance, he could be as happy as the aforementioned clam. Has anyone ever even met this gloomy person? Do tell.

Did anyone ever tell you that you’ve “lost your marbles”? I am just wondering just how many marbles do we have to have to be considered sane. Is it one dozen, or two dozen? And what happens when you lose them? Do you cease to think clearly? And if you did in fact lose your marbles, can you ever get them back? Is there a marble buyback program we don’t know about?

My father once told me to clean up my filthy room or I would wind up “in the doghouse”. I never understood that. We didn’t even have a dog. And if there was a so-called “doghouse”, I wondered if it was too uncomfortably small and cramped to be able to fit a medium-sized teenager like me. I’m sure it didn’t have air conditioning or indoor plumbing either. And my last thought was what would happen if the owner (perhaps a big ol’ Great Dane) came home and found you squatting in their home. I’m sure someone’s getting a chewing out!

I had a teacher once who tried to teach me how to solve equations. She would drill me over and over and I still couldn’t figure it out. Finally, she said, “you will wind up flipping hamburgers for a living… let that ‘”sink in”‘. At that point, my mind wandered into another galaxy. I wanted to tell her that if I did see a sink stuck outside in the cold, I would certainly let that sink in. After all, I’m not a heartless person with no soul, so why would I let that poor sink suffer. I didn’t say any of this out loud or I’m sure I would have gotten smacked over my head with a ruler.

My 16 year-old sister was being mean and nasty to our Mom. After hearing the yelling and screaming, Mom yelled back at her, saying she was “going to hell in a handbasket”. My first thought was, “Where is hell anyway?”. Is it off Route 3 near Hackensack? Does someone deliver you there in a taxi? And while we’re at it, “How do you fit a four-foot petite teenager into a handbasket that was just meant for storing only “hands” in the first place? Oh, and has anyone ever been there who was able to relate to its atmosphere? HMMMMM?

Everyone makes a mistake now and then. It’s part of being human. And, speaking of doing stupid things, when people mess things up, why are they so intent on going back to “square one”? What is so inviting about this number-one square? Is it a safe place? Is it because it has concentric sides? And why can’t we just skip past square one and go right to square two? Would we be subject to arrest by the correctness police?

If someone does something so extraordinary, why do we say that they “take the cake”? Is having the entire cake really that rewarding? If I win a battle of any sort, is my top prize an abundance of sweet sugary pastry, and is that the ultimate reward? Personally, I would rather have a large stack of non-sequentially numbered twenty-dollar bills. I could buy some fruit and maybe a banana cream pie, which I like better than cake.

My late uncle went through an awful divorce, and the judge awarded the ex-wife “the whole ball of wax”. Of course, that meant that she got everything they owned. If the judge had granted her only one-half of a ball of wax, it wouldn’t have been a ball at all because you can’t have half of a ball. As it turned out, my uncle wound up getting “bupkiss”, meaning nothing. (Try to say that word three times fast… tough; isn’t it?)

Here is another good one. Why is the conclusion of anything purposeful or meaningful never fully completed until “the fat lady sings”? Why don’t skinny ladies sing and get any substantial recognition for how they perform? And why can’t a fat lady just recite a poem or play the flute to get noticed? What if the fat person is not that talented in singing opera? If there is no singing, do we still have to go on performing that task?

As a side note, why did AI give this lady three hands?

My neighbor was out in her fenced-in backyard hanging her laundry on a clothesline, when I noticed that she was “naked as a jaybird”. Of course, we all know that common jaybirds do not own any clothing, so they aren’t exactly bare-assed. But so are all the other birds, and yet they don’t seem to be picked out of the lineup for being nude. Almost all birds have feathers, except for the elusive penguins who are always dressed to kill in their luxurious tuxedos.

My good friends back home decided that after their fifth child, they would have to find another place to live. They also decided to move to the “middle of nowhere”. So, my question to them was, if you are moving to nowhere, how do you know that you’ve arrived? Nowhere would not be labeled on a map, and there would be no visible street signs to inform you that you have reached your destination. This place would be so remote that nobody could find it, and since a nobody is also a nonexistent being lacking in physical substance, how would anyone know that they found this nowhere in the first place… right?

I’m going to leave you with something else to ponder. How about the word “giving”? Giving is a word that can conjure up a thousand idioms. Just think of how many times giving is used in ordinary speech. From the most common phrase, such as “give a crap”, or “give me a hand”, to more obscure sayings like “give someone what for”, or “give someone your best shot”, this word is definitely overused. Here’s what I mean. You could “give someone hell”, “a nod”, “the shaft”, “the finger”, “some skin”, “the old heave ho”, “the business”, “the evil eye”, “grief”, “a ring” (either jewelry or a phone call), “a damn”, “a tumble”, “a slap on the wrist”, “the brush off”, “a pink slip”, and last but not least, “the shirt off your back”. There are also a number of other “gives” using rather colorful words. Can you think of any?

So that’s it for today… unless you want me to delve into the word “have”, and it’s idioms, because there are only about a million of those and we’d be here till midnight.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. I hope you have enjoyed this trip through slangs, sayings and idioms. It was fun!.. Please subscribe if you haven’t already, and I’ll keep posting fun stuff like this. Stay tuned.

Lenny