THE RAP ON SLANG : How the Latest Lingo Leaps Into the Language, and Why Experts Are Having Trouble Keeping Up

I can take a phrase that’s rarely heard. Flip it, now it’s a daily word.

--Rap musician Rakim

H ardware . Wetware. Meatware.

The latest yuppie kitchen utensils? Fall fashions from Silicon Valley? A three-course synthetic TV dinner?

To slang experts, hardware, wetware and meatware are all computer terms--one old, two freshly minted. Hardware (computer machinery) is now so familiar it’s in the dictionary as standard usage. Wetware (the brain and its DNA code) and meatware (a hip reference to the human body, seen as “a bunch of meat and juices”) are leading-edge slang from cyberpunks (high-tech enthusiasts known for their futuristic ideas and outlaw natures).

How do such new words wind up being spoken by the low-tech enthusiasts among us? And how soon might we find them served up mid-cocktail in party conversation, ready for digestion with the sushi and stuffed snow peas?

According to those who create, catalogue and analyze slang, terms are being created at such a dizzying pace these days that it’s virtually impossible for anyone to remain current with all of them.

The ‘In’ Group

“The reason slang develops is that it identifies people as an ‘in’ group. We have many more groups in society now . . . ,” said UCLA linguistics professor Victoria Fromkin, former president of the Linguistics Society of America.

“At one time in higher education there were only seven liberal arts. Now, at UCLA we have 92 Ph.D. programs and 68 departments. In my own field, linguistics, there are a number of different subspecialties. Each subspecialty develops its own technical terms and slang.”

Observers also suspect that the lag time between the creation of slang and its appearance in the mass media is growing shorter. Consider, for instance, a frustration of Esther and Albert Lewin, co-authors of “The Thesaurus of Slang.”

The Sherman Oaks couple spent six years on their manuscript and made last-minute additions to it about seven months ago. Since then, they’ve nearly filled a shoe box with 3-by-5-inch cards listing hundreds of new slang terms chiefly from media sources--all discovered too late for inclusion in their just-published book. Thus, among the book’s 150,000 entries, readers will find such teen-age synonyms for vomiting as the Technicolor yawn but not talking to the seals or calling Earl’s.

Glossaries of Slang

Timothy Leary, the drug guru-futurist turned socialite and stand-up philosopher, has found new slang appearing so rapidly that he’s writing an interactive computer program featuring glossaries of slang from several groups to help people keep up with shifts in the language. He has long been fascinated with those groups in society who are challenging the old order and creating the new, especially cyberpunks and teen-agers. And he observes that such groups typically create their own languages, almost as an act of power.

“For example, to be a body builder,” he said, referring to a group whose slang is just beginning to spill over to the mainstream, “you have to take charge of your body and write your own script. You’ve got to be a special, take-charge sort of person to do that. Groups that come out with their own languages are on the new frontiers of cultures. They’re doing something very, very new where there’s not been 500 years of sacraments and grace.”

While many new languages are coming from such slang-producing groups as rap musicians, body builders, skateboarders, stockbrokers and others, not even the language pros who study how words are coined and passed into general circulation are willing to predict which new slangs are likely to move into standard usage.

“There’s no way to tell, no clues at all. You never know what’s going to catch the public’s imagination or a generation’s,” said lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, editor of the Dictionary of American Slang and considered by many to be the foremost authority on U.S. slang.

Thus, language watchers will have to wait to see if society at large picks up on the lingo generated at the recent political conventions: At the Republican gathering, Democrats were accused of practicing pastel patriotism for not decorating their arena with traditional red, white and blue. At the Democratic convention, after Arkansas Gov. William Clinton’s overlong speech, any politician making a career-trashing blunder was described as doing a Clinton .

In Flexner’s experience, slang tends to spring from social groups that are the first to confront new objects, new situations and new concepts--for which there may be no adequate words. In addition, he said, each new generation typically invents its share of new words to describe the same old things.

The author of “I Hear America Talking” and “Listening to America,” Flexner has observed that slang is most likely to come from two sources: big groups in constant contact with larger society (teen-agers, for instance) and small, tightly knit groups so engrossed in their own world and removed from society that they “evolve an extensive, highly personal and vivid vocabulary” (groups such as computer fanatics).

Fab 5 Freddy, a New York-based painter and music video director who recently produced a TV special on slang for the BBC, points out that much new language also comes from groups who are dissatisfied with mainstream thought and language.

“The way black people have always spoken is a reflection of the fact that black people and people of color are not satisfied with a certain situation. Every generation of black people comes up with something different and it’s usually reflected in our music,” said Freddy, a.k.a. Fred Braithwaite, adding that today’s spoken rap music has taken the place of jazz as a leading supplier of slang.

Elder Statesman of Rap

Though he’s considered an elder statesmen of rap or hip-hop, Freddy declined to estimate just how deeply its language has moved into the mainstream. But here’s a clue: He’s 28 and he grew up hearing and speaking phrases such as, “Yo , that’s bad . ‘ ‘ (Rough translation: “Hey, that’s cool.”)

According to Freddy, street talkers and rappers long ago abandoned bad for such alternatives as fresh, def and chillin’ . More recent synonyms include dope (which “has a naughty ring to it; it’s addicting”) and lampin’ (a cross between chillin’ and illin’ (acting a little wild)).

Ice-T, Los Angeles’ best-known rap musician, doesn’t hesitate to speculate on what he sees as the instant impact of rap.

“It usually goes into the language as fast as the records come out,” said the artist, who recorded the title track on the “Colors” sound-track album and whose latest release, “Rhyme Pays,” is nearing gold-record status.

Referring to himself and other rappers as “ultra-high-tech talkers,” Ice-T claimed: “We dictate how people talk. We make up words . . . if it’s good, it’ll hook (catch on) and people will get hip to it real fast.”

In Flexner’s experience, one factor in whether the language of such pioneering groups is likely to cross over to the mainstream is its usefulness. Thus when the computer began to transform the culture in the late 1970s and ‘80s, words once spoken only by gear freaks and digit heads were increasingly heard in everyday parlance.

In fact, some have pointed out that computer language is so ingrained in late-’80s conversations, that its users may not even be aware of its origins.

Computer Terms

“A lot of business people now talk about user-friendly ideas,” said Richard Byrne, an international lecturer on computer technology and an adjunct professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications.

“They talk about input and output. They say things like, ‘When do you think you can log on with this project?’ when that’s actually an accountant asking a lawyer for a memo,” said Byrne, president of the Los Angeles-based Byrne Group.

“It’s ubiquitous. It’s absolutely everywhere. People are using computer jargon and slang to describe processes that probably should be described in English. People don’t even realize how much computerese they’re talking. They’ll say, ‘That doesn’t compute with me.’ Or ‘I don’t think Bill’s on line at all,’ meaning his intelligence is in question.”

Corporate slang has also been shaped by the growing numbers of takeovers, mergers and acquisitions in the last few years, in the view of Kathleen Odean, author of “Wall Street Slang: High Steppers, Fallen Angels & Lollipops.”

“The body of hostile takeover slang that’s come about in the last 15 years is particularly full of recurring metaphors for violence,” Odean said. “These players are macho guys and they make themselves out as even more macho. . . . There’s an old stock market proverb: ‘Buy when the blood is running in the Street,’ which is sort of the way they look at it--like life and death.”

Odean found that much market slang such as brokers’ nicknames for various stocks and bonds circulates chiefly within the trading community.

But she’s noticed that some of the the terms associated with takeovers-- raiders (who try to buy companies against the will of management), white knights (congenial buyers sought as alternates to raiders) and greenmail (the process of buying the raider off)--are extensively used as insider shoptalk and by the public as well.

When there’s a truly dramatic movement in the stock market, language is minted and circulated literally overnight, Odean said, citing last fall’s Black Monday as a piece of slang in wide use the day after the stock market crash on Oct. 19.

Gym Dandies

In the world of body building, which receives less media coverage than corporate takeovers and the stock market, only a few terms have made it to the vocabularies of outsiders, according to writer-body builder Teagan Clive, author of the self-published book “Workout Words.” Words such as buffed (muscular) or bruiser (strong person) can now be heard at most any gym or health club; thus they’re now shunned by the hippest body builders in favor of more specific descriptions, she said.

Clive, who flexed her muscles for David Lee Roth’s “California Girls” music video, reports that well-developed muscles, especially the triceps, are referred to as shredded , while well-defined pectoral muscles or pecs are known as biscuits of shredded wheat . Shredded calf muscles are cows . Body builders with prominent veins are known as road maps, and if their skin is particularly dehydrated it’s onion skin , she said.

“We have terms for everything,” Clive said. “Body builders who are always on parade are called floats. And when the periorbital fat disappears under your eyes and the skin touches the bone and black half circles appear under your eyes, we even have a term for that: cadaver. It’s a complimentary term to signify that body fat in the facial area has dissipated.”

Another athletic arena with a lexicon edge occasionally seeping over to a broader audience is skateboarding. “Skateboarding is a really big thing now, an offshoot of the whole surf culture,” said Michael Tomson, who was once the fifth-ranked surfer in the world. “But skate terminology isn’t in any way known to the mass culture the way surf terminology is.”

These days, Tomson is president of Costa Mesa-based Gotcha Inc., a sportswear firm that sponsors surf and skateboard tournaments. Among the skateboarding terms he frequently hears are bio or bionic (really good) and slammed or got in a pile (the skateboard equivalent of wiping out on a surfboard).

Like early computer terms, much surf lingo is now so ingrained in the mass culture that many people don’t even known where they originated. As examples, Tomson cited such surf classics as stoked (highly excited), unreal (extraordinary), full on (intense), bogus (bad) and blown away (surprised). Among the newer surf words he hears are wanker (a surfer wannabe , or someone who wants to be a surfer), drilled (pummeled by a wave) and killed (did very well), an expression long used by stand-up comics to mean the same thing.

As slang spreads, it often is borrowed from one industry by another. At the moment, the phrase go clean is sometimes used by Hollywood types to describe what happens when a film sells out all its shows on opening weekend. But some in the industry point out that the phrase was previously used in the recording business to indicate sell-out concerts.

“The origin of a lot of Hollywood expressions is television, where the velocity and quantity of the pitches (to sell ideas to networks) is enormous and the network needs are so specific,” said Lynda Obst, a producer at Walt Disney Studios. “The term tent poles (in film, hit movies that prop up the studio financially and finance other undertakings) came from television. For them, it’s a piece of casting that creates a tent pole. For us, it’s the germ of an idea or the film itself.”

Going Hollywood

Hollywood slang has become so widespread, particularly among those who buy and sell film ideas, that some who know the lingo well intentionally refrain from using it--even some of those who’ve been known to contribute to the industry lexicon.

Case in point: Robert Kosberg, vice president of feature film development for the Guber-Peters Co., an executive known around town as the pitch king (project salesman extraordinaire).

Kosberg admits to being fluent in Hollywood slang and to coining such phrases as napkin notion (an idea jotted down at a restaurant meeting before it goes on to become a movie). But he now claims to avoid the jargon whenever possible.

“You don’t want to give the impression that everything you say is superficial,” he said. “The more slang you use, the more you’re going to add to the image that all you are is a salesman or . . . what’s often called in Hollywood a dog-and-pony show. “

Once in a while, Kosberg said, he will still drop a bit of slang into his conversations, but only if it’s clear he is using it with the awareness that it’s a cliche and he and his listeners are in on the joke.

Despite such indications of a countertrend, many believe slang is irrepressible and the wise will learn to understand it now--so they can converse fluently today in tomorrow’s cliches.

Leary, for one, is particularly convinced that cyberpunk, which he defines as the language of “anarchists and free agents who use high tech for fun, personal growth or whimsy,” is likely to become standard English within 10 years.

He is serious and expects cyberpunk terms such as pod (corporate clones in thought, behavior and appearance) and technotrash (a technically brilliant but unpleasant individual who acts like a social idiot) to catch on.

“I get a lot of cyberpunk from computer bulletin boards. And I have friends who send me transcripts of (computer) conversations the cyberpunks have between each other,” Leary said. “They think that intelligent life is moving from the body into these hyperspace, super-information systems. Their basic line is that if you want to be immortal, digitize everything. . . . Within four or five years, most intelligent people will be digitizing almost everything they do that’s worth saving.”

Come again? Howzat? Say what?

This story was prepared before the death Friday of computer technology expert Richard Byrne.

LEADING-EDGE TERMS FROM FIVE CULTURES

BODY BUILDING

Ramboid-a glamor-prone body builder who tries to look like Sylvester Stallone by wearing a torn bandanna, possibly hairspray and mascara (waterproof).

Clark Kent-someone who arrives at gym disguised by suit, tie, glasses and is transformed by workout apparel.

Pee-wee Herman-an underdeveloped gym-goer likly to wear black socks, white shorts and white, V-neck T-shirt.

Nautlilust-the obession of those who are addicted to machine workouts.

cacti-body builders who frequently shave their bodies.

sponge-body builder with too much salt in diet,thus too much water in tissues.

COMPUTERS

nerdling-immature, naive computer hacker

wireheads-fanatics addicted to computers to the point of neglecting the normal things in life

splash-to shoot something down, especially a new computer program.

wetware-the human brain and its DNA code.

tech-mech-industrial engineers who “sold out” to the military or a corporation.

techno-trash-brilliant technician who’s a social idiot.

RAP MUSIC

dope-very cool, very good, great (similar to def or bad, but more addicting).

nitro-very good, more explosive than dope.

on the strength-really great,as in “His show was on the strength.”

living large-doing well.

clockin’-bringing in, as in “clockin’ dollars.”

got the vapors-trying to absorb someone’s fame or creative juices, as in “he got the vapors.”

HOLLYWOOD

toast-finished in one’s career, as in “He’s toast.”

spin-short for topspin, used to describe project with a familiar story, based on a previous hit but with an element of freshness.

E-ticket movie-film equivalent of the best ride at Disneyland. Current E-tickets: “Midnight Run,” “Die Hard.”

tent poles-hit movies that finance all of a studio’s other undertakings; once known as “locomotives” and reserved for the Christmas season.

go clean-to sell out all shows during a film’s opening weekend, as in “Bull Durham” went clean.”

front load-acquire up front, in advance ; may describe gaining advance publicity for a film that may prove hard to sell.

SKATEBOARDING

bio-short for bionic, really good.

fakies, reverts, posers-those who are not proficient at skateboarding but pretend to be.

nosepick grind-difficult skateboard trick performed with the nose of the board.

get in a pile-to wiepout or fall off skateboard.

scabs-short ramps used in skateboarding.

blazin’-doing very well.