It’s Dope, So Chill : For the Young, Slang’s ‘Mad’ New Words Are Straight Off the Streets of Los Angeles

It was an on-hit kind of afternoon in L.A.

A mac daddy was scamming on a fly houchy, while one of his homies was clocking some dead Presidents. Meantime, the rest of the $yndicate were trying to kick it , but were being gaffled up by a one time.

If you’re thrown by this, you’re probably under 10, over 20 or from some totally uncool place. But most self-respecting Southern California teen-agers know what’s up:

It was a good day in Los Angeles. A charming young man was flirting with an attractive young female , while one of his friends was at work earning money. At the same time, the rest of his pals were trying to relax , but were being hassled by a police officer.

For as long as anyone can remember (and probably longer), slang has been a significant means of communication among teen-agers. It is a sign of belonging, a secret code designed to confuse parents, teachers and anyone else not in the know. By the time adults figure out a particular slang phase, it usually has taken on new meanings or been tossed out altogether.

Like clothing fashions and hair styles, many of the hippest new words are emerging from Southern California, especially Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, says Timothy Leary, a ‘60s cult figure who has been collecting slang for several years.

The city, long renowned for its young gangsters, is also becoming famous for what might be called its slangsters.

Among middle- and upper-income white students, “everyone is totally into inner-city street language . . . no matter who they are or where they live,” says Rory Laverty, a 17-year-old from Manhattan Beach, who just graduated from the Chadwick School, an exclusive private school on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“There is a lot of yearning to be black,” says Laverty, who is white and headed for Amherst College in Massachusetts this fall. In his circle of classmates, “everyone calls each other ‘bro’ (for brother). They say, ‘What’s up, G?’ (gangster). And you hear all the time, ‘Are you dissin’ me?’ (Are you being disrespectful?)”

Just as gang members go gang banging--slang for killing and stealing--to protect their turf, people who make up slang “use words to defy authority and to hang on to a little turf of their own,” says Connie C. Eble, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leading slang expert.

Given that the teen years are a time when people often feel most alienated, it is probably natural that teen-agers would identify with a group that has historically been among the most oppressed.

“In some ways, there is nothing new in all this,” says UCLA linguist Pamela Munro, another expert on slang. “Many people who have used slang over the years have gotten it from the black community. They just didn’t recognize it as such. Now with Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall and Ice-T and all the other black rappers we see and hear about through the mass media, it’s being acknowledged where these words come from.”

Originally, slang referred to the specialized vocabulary and idioms of criminals, but it is now part of the vernacular of every identifiable group in society--be they drug addicts, body builders, police or Wall Street lawyers.

“It is a particular way of talking about ordinary events in daily life used by members of a group to identify themselves as belonging to that group,” Munro observes.

And no one longs to belong more than do teens.

If the number of slang terms for crime is any indication, violence and run-ins with the law have become all too common for many youngsters in Los Angeles’ inner-city neighborhoods.

Gats are guns; thorns are knives. Vicking and racking are terms for stealing. Pilling and smoking mean killing. Five-0s and one times refer to police officers.

Some of these terms are resurrected from the past. Gat, for example, is an old slang word for pistol, dating back at least to the 1930s. Five-0 comes from the 1960s television series “Hawaii Five-0.”

One time is so new that experts have not traced its origin. And young people who use the term can only speculate, although their theories seem to reveal a great deal about their own experiences.

“My theory is that everyone is hassled by a cop at sometime or other. They always have a story to tell about it, and the story always begins, ‘One time . . .,’ ” says Alex Merlis, who recently graduated from North Hollywood High School and is headed for Harvard University this fall.

Lorenzo Straight, an 18-year-old rap musician from Watts, says he believes one time may be derived from the perception of minority teens that one confrontation with the police can be their last. “One time they catch you, and you’re in for it”--meaning you go to jail or the grave.

In low-income neighborhoods, there are numerous slang expressions for cash: Dead Presidents , a resurrected term from the 1940s, refers to paper money. Inns and ducats --originally a term for coins bearing the image of a duke--also refer to money.

On the affluent Westside, there appears to be no special slang expression for money, perhaps because there is enough to go around. There also are relatively few crime-related slang words, according to Chay Carter, a recent graduate of Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, who plans to attend USC this fall.

There are, however, numerous slang terms for eating and eating establishments, which may be an indication of how young people in the suburbs spend their free time. Grindage is food. Taco Hell is Taco Bell. Mickey D’s is McDonald’s--a term the company itself is using in television commercials.

One characteristic of current slang is that it designed not only to confuse but also to embarrass. A classic example is from “Wayne’s World,” a wacky, hip “Saturday Night Live” segment on suburban teen-agers that was recently made into a feature-length film.

In Wayne’s now-famous way of talking, a statement is made, then immediately negated. You might say, “Kansas is a majorly cool state.” After giving your listener a split second to reflect, you would scream, with just the right intonation, “NOT!”--thus demonstrating the foolishness of your statement and the gullibility of your listener.

“A lot of adults have finally caught on to what these things mean, so, of course, they are completely out with kids here,” observes Elena Chavez, program coordinator for Kids City, a youth organizing center in Santa Monica.

Similarly, once city slang has made its way to suburbs and small towns, it is likely to have lost most, if not all, of its cachet among the city’s slangsters.

For example, psych , which is used in the same way as not, was popular among Los Angeles teen-agers a year or so ago. Today no self-respecting L.A. teen would use the term, although younger children occasionally do, and it has become very popular with teen-agers in such places as northern New Jersey.

In Los Angeles and elsewhere, one of the things that today’s teens are doing linguistically is twisting the meaning of old words to give them currency. When many of today’s parents were teen-agers, the word dope was a term both for marijuana and someone whose intelligence or judgment was suspect, as in “I like to smoke dope. My brother doesn’t; he’s a dope.”

“Now when you say ‘My brother is dope,’ you mean that he is a very cool person,” says Chavez.

In the 1960s, “You would have said, ‘That party was a bomb,’ meaning it was a flop,” she explains. “Now if you say, ‘That party is bomb’ or ‘That food is bombing,’ you mean that they are great.”

The point is always the same: to “confuse people so they won’t know what you are talking about,” says Straight, whose rap group is known as Straight Up. “We make up new words as we need them, or we give old words new meanings. By the time it gets out of the black community, we’re on to something else. The words change every five to six months.”

Not long ago, to say someone was bad meant the person was good. Today “bad” is not nearly so good as it once was, Straight says. Mad is what’s current, as in “She got a mad body,” meaning “She has a good body.”

Throughout the city, there are numerous teen terms for females, many of which are offensive to girls. A “portable” girl is one who is “cute enough to take along in public.” An especially attractive girl is a “freak mama” or a “fly houchy.”

“I won’t even tell you the words that are used for gays” at UCLA, says Munro, who conducts regular surveys on college slang. “The list is long . . . and very offensive.”

Despite racial tensions in Los Angeles, Munro says teens do not appear to have adopted new racially derogatory slang. But as minority teens are thrown together in schools and neighborhoods, the slang of different races has become intermingled.

For some years now, African-American and Latino youngsters have been combining the grammatical structure of black English with Spanish slang in what language specialists have dubbed Jive Spanglish. “My homeboy is loc” translates to standard English as “My friend is loco, “ the Spanish word for crazy. “I be with that freak mama p.v.” means “I’ll stay with my girlfriend for por vida, “ for life.

“Some of these young people sound so much alike that if you put them behind a curtain, I couldn’t tell you whether they were black or brown,” says Thelma Duncan, an African-American language expert for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Youth jargon has traveled widely over the generations. When the grandparents of today’s teen-agers were themselves teens, the slang capital of the country was the Big Apple, 1920s jazz slang for “big-time” New York City. In the 1950s, when many of today’s parents were youngsters, New York youths parroted black jazz singers and created the cool and crazy lingo of the Beatnik era.

In the 1960s, the country’s linguistic epicenter moved to Frisco and Berserkely--slang for San Francisco and Berkeley, the country’s bastions of flower power and acid rock talk. At about the same time, the first big wave of L.A. teenspeak hit the nation with the totally tubular vocab of surfspeak. By the early 1980s, Los Angeles’ sprawling suburbs in the San Fernando Valley had given birth to “gag me with a spoon,” “grody to the max” Valley Girl talk.

Some slang words are intergenerational, says Albert Lewin of Hollywood, co-author with his wife, Esther, of “The Random House Thesaurus of Slang.”

Many people believe the term dude originated with surfers, as in “Yo, dude, what’s up?” In fact, Lewin says, the term, spelled dudde, dates from Shakespearean days. It eventually came to mean an overdressed Easterner who went West (hence the term dude ranch). Today, dude is still in vogue with some teens as a term for a cool person.

Cool is perhaps the slang word of longest standing. According to Lewin, it has been used, without any discernible change in meaning, since at least the 1930s. And there are now variations on the word: To chill means to relax, as in, “I’m going to chill.”

It is impossible, experts agree, to predict which slang terms will be discarded and which will enter the mainstream. “What is clear,” Lewin says, is that “the slang you grow up with will be the slang you use for the rest of your life.”

As teen-agers make up new slang, adults persist in trying to figure the meaning and the origins of it: Munro, Eble and the Lewins are doing research and writing books on the subject. Based on the Lewins’ thesaurus, Avalon-Hill, a Baltimore game publisher, is designing a board game called “Slang.” The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department gang division has prepared a glossary of street slang to help law enforcement officers. And Youth Research, a Connecticut market research firm, has started offering slang seminars to advertisers to help them reach today’s youthful consumers.

But many of these efforts are surely futile.

When it comes to the way teens talk, “it changes so fast,” Chavez says, “no one can keep up.”

Teen-Agers’ Slang Deciphered

Here is a sampler of teen-age slang phrases and their usages, brought to you by some of Los Angeles’s fastest-talking slang bangers:

* Betty: An attractive female, as in Betty Rubble of the television show “The Flintstones.” Synonyms: fly houchy, freak mama, ho.

* Daddy mac: An attractive male. Synonyms: mac daddy, freak daddy.

* Dead Presidents: Money. Synonyms: inns, ducats, duckets.

* Dissin’: To treat a person with disrespect.

* Dope: Good, favorable. Synonym: fresh.

* Five-0: Police officer, from the television show “Hawaii Five-0.” Synonym--one time.

* Fred: An unattractive or unintelligent male, as in Fred Flintstone of the television show “The Flintstones.” Synonyms--Barney, as in Barney Rubble of the same show.

* Gaffle up: To confuse, mess up, hurt.

* Homiez: Friends; preferred spelling for homies, short for homeboys or homegirls.

* Hood: Neighborhood.

* Jam: Song, music. Also, to leave quickly.

* Kick it: To relax. Synonyms: to chill out.

* On hit: Good, exciting. Synonyms: cool, funky, dope, kickin’.

* Played out: Tiresome, boring.

* Player: Promiscuous person.

* Pill: To kill someone. Synonym: smoke.

* $yndicate: Group of friends. Synonyms: posse, houser.

* Vick: To steal. Synonyms: rack, go on a candy or beer run.

* Wilma: Unattractive female, as in Wilma Flintstone of the television show “The Flintstones.”