‘Collegespeak’ for the Reality-Impaired
Don’t zone out, all you kens, herbs and chip heads. Get stoked for a cholo blizz of news writing.
In other words, listen carefully, all you guys who like to cook or who are geeks and computer nerds. Get ready for some very macho, wanton news writing.
Today’s collegians are busy reforging--some would say twisting--the gold-tipped tongue of Chaucer and Shakespeare, according to Merriam-Webster. Like most slang, the newspeak is both phat (very cool) and confusing for the reality-impaired (unintelligent).
In a recent survey, the Springfield-based lexicographer unearthed a trove of new words on U.S. campuses this fall. It also discovered a nostalgic tendency to retrofit old words.
“What I see is a much greater integration of cultures, but I also see a stronger-than-ever regionalism,” said Susan Leslie, a vice president of Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster, which publishes “Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,” finished collecting questionnaires from 23 campuses nationwide on Sept. 30. In the unscientific poll, they asked 460 students to name the five hottest words on campus this fall and to define them.
One lexical furrow reflects the country’s racial and ethnic diversity. It yielded such words as fly, meaning culturally avant-garde (cool), and cholo, meaning virile and stout-hearted (very macho), from a term once used to describe a Mexican gang member.
Many such words are rooted deeply in the turf of a particular region.
Some Midwestern college students call their New England classmates chogs. The farm boy who spends so little time by the ocean that he doesn’t know enough to close his mouth while swimming is a salt sucker. In the past, he might have been called a hayseed.
Other college slang has been recycled. Such terms include crib, a word for home that was also popular in the 1960s; and boot, a verb for what happens when you drink too much beer, regurgitated from the 1970s.
Still other campus lingo (a dialect, jargon or special vocabulary that one is not familiar with) simply celebrates or vilifies in vermilion verbiage the fixtures of collegiate life.
A homeskillet is a good friend with whom one can breakfast on sauce with a circle of death (beer and bad pizza). And don’t forget to momaflage the kind when you go home (hide whatever kind of drug you use in your suitcase so your mother can’t find it).
One word of wisdom from a college graduate who supports his family by stringing words into news stories: Ditch the drugs, bag the collegespeak and talk like your elders when the time comes to snare that beauteous maximus (good job).
