Campus Slang Guide Spells Out Student-Speak

It’s no Oxford English, but this ain’t Oxford. And although the English contained in this dictionary may baffle more erudite collectors of lexicons, the scholars who assembled Cal Poly Pomona’s latest reference book maintain that their tome is “da bomb.”

Fascinated by the link between language and cultural identity, Cal Poly Pomona professor Judi Sanders instructed students in her undergraduate intercultural communication class to cull all the gems of speech that they heard on campus for 10 weeks and compile the definitive guide to student-speak.

The result is the fifth edition of a campus slang dictionary, “Da Bomb! Dis Is Dope, Dude! Dig It!”--a funny reference book and an intriguing sociological look at college culture.

“College students make slang about things that are of consequence in their lives,” Sanders said. “Money is of consequence, so there are a lot of terms about money. Sex and relationships are also part of college life . . . and there are a lot of terms about intoxicants.”

Collections of colloquialisms are older than Moon Zappa’s Valley Girl manual or any of the multitudinous politically correct how-to guides. But “Da Bomb!” has inspired a new wave of word madness on campus: It has been out for less than a month, and already 100 copies have been snatched up.

“They have 4:20 in there?” said biology senior Don Keidel, 21, flipping through a coveted copy in the student cafeteria. The term “4:20” is a popular marijuana reference. Then catching himself, he muttered, “I’ve, uh, heard other people say that.”

Keidel’s eyes widened as he read more slang terms that he’s, uh, heard other people use.

“Lit,” he laughed, reading a colloquialism for intoxication. “This is funny.”

*

As popular as it is with students, the dictionary will probably never make it into the likes of Oprah’s book club. The compilation can only be purchased, at $2 a pop, through its publisher/distributor, the Cal Poly Communication Department.

Although some of the words are endemic to Cal Poly (“Bronco swapmeet,” for instance, refers to vendors who sell their goods in the quad area of campus), many of the phrases found in the dictionary can be heard on college and high school campuses across the nation.

During a visitor-teaching stint at Iowa State in 1994, Sanders noticed that her Midwestern students included many of the same words in their slang dictionary that her California students used.

To Sanders, the duplication indicates that college students may speak alike because of similar, media-related experiences. But to Sanders’ colleagues, the universally popular words could mean that she has a bestseller on her hands.

Friends and staff members have urged her to publish a commercial “best of” version of the dictionaries. But she’s not interested.

“My academic interests are in a different direction,” Sanders said, with a shrug. “I’m interested in what slang says about us.”

What she hears in today’s “in-talk,” as she sometimes calls slang, are the changes in an average student’s life. While things might have been groovy when she was a student, today’s students are under a little more pressure.

In fact, they’re buggin’.

And as the social and political climate changes, so too does the slang. Having published five dictionaries over seven years, Sanders has noticed that some words--and the ideas that they symbolize--have dropped out of the vernacular.

“What I sometimes do is not just have students gather new slang, but have them edit out [obsolete] words from the old dictionary,” Sanders said.

Among the more telling deletions are myriad words referring to sex. “Da Bomb” has far fewer sex terms than previous books, sparking speculation about students’ social life.

“I’m sure it’s not that students are having less sex, but it’s [considered] less polite to talk about it,” Sanders said. “Students are more conservative.”

*

Or perhaps they’re desensitized to sex, suggests Jim Sutton, an economics professor and a longtime fan of Sanders’ dictionaries: “It’s a more common thing now.”

It may be discussed with less frequency, but not with less vividness, said Rozalyn Tarrant, who at 41 is the oldest student in the class. “There were times I was embarrassed to ask the definition of some words.”

Tarrant said her work in Sanders’ 10-week course has opened her up to new ways of communicating--and has even helped her relate to her two teenagers.

“This jargon,” she said, “I’ve started to pick it up. Now instead of telling my kids to calm down, I tell them to take a chill pill. I can’t believe it.”

Of course, breaking the language barrier is not always cool with those who talk the in-talk, said Communication Department Chairman Richard Kallan, exposing the irony of “Da Bomb!”

“As soon as the regular population starts to use it, new slang is invented,” he said. “The very publication of the words makes them no longer the right-on thing to say.”

Right on?

Do people still say that?