Nunberg on slang, part deux
"Is that your snum? I'll gully the dag and bimbole the clicky in a snuffkin."
This quote from Thakeray's Vanity Fair pokes fun at the myriad of slang terms that were all the rage in Victorian society. Slang terms for readers of that era were used to color the underworld of society, the language of theives, pickpockets, thugs, and persons of ill repute. Slang was "the repository of all the violent and erotic currents that repsectable society could not acknowledge in itself, and it provided names for all the things that respectable people found literally unspeakable."(p.62)
This feeling of salacious evil in words described in Nunbergs "The Decline of Slang" prevailed until about the Jazz Age, in the 1930's, when the language of gangsters in the movies made such language both universially accessible and, well, cool. Today, though, Nunberg suggests that slang is the language of the middle class, borrowing from below and above, but permeated throughout:
"It is the language of hippies, surfers, hot-tubbers, yuppies, druggies, swingers, hackers, and the rest...Slang doesn't hint at forbidden mysteries anymore." (p.63)
To a certain extent, I think he is wrong. All craziness about Ebonics a few years ago aside, there is still a sense, at least in academia (where I have been the last -- well, all but one year of my life) of "proper" English versus "street" language. F-bombs are still bleeped from seconds-delayed programming. Teachers do not encourage students to speak like most of the rap artists and professional football players they worship. On the flip side, artists pick on people who have not earned their "street cred," as if having run-ins with the law and/or swearing frequently and exploring certain topics not covered in Ladies Home Journal in your art make you somehow more credible as a performer. Maybe these things do -- I cannot pretend to know as I dislike most artforms where this is a requirement. One artist argued that is was the language of a persecuted people (the poor, mostly African-Americans in his example.)
It makes me wonder if my people, the Irish, who had it worse at times than anyone on earth, required "street cred" before people were allowed to perform their music or recite Yeats or Joyce. And I didn't see a smattering of it in Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela. This could be a PhD dissertation!
The last in this Slang-fest series is "The Rebirth of Cool."
"In 1957 [Norman] Mailer estimated that there were a hundred thousand hipsters in America; now you'd be hard put to find that many squares. Is everybody cool here? Solid." (p.75)
This essay focuses specifically on the phenomenon of the word "cool." Here Nunberg cites Norman Mailer's famous essay "The White Negro" wherein he decribes people who snapped on the upbeats and used phrases like "that cat's really on his groove, dad." While other words used in hipster lingo seem to have died out, cool is "eternal." (p.74) He notes the variations: uncool (1970's), way cool (1980's) , cool in names in the 90's like Coolio and Kool Moe Dee, and "terminal cool," which is cool used in everyday everything -- click here for cool stuff. (ibid.)
Here, I have to agree with Nunberg. Cool never did go away -- it has morphed, perhaps, but I know I still use it. And it will live on in new generations. One of my daughter's favorite websites, www.noggin.com, features a pigeon pattern game with Bert from Sesame Street. When she gets a pattern completed correctly, the pigeons dance, cooing, "cool pattern, cool pattern." Brooke, at age three and a half, already associates the word cool with something positive, something she would like. This time of year she likes to see the holiday displays as I shop. Upon seeing this year's lights for the first time, she said, "That's cool, momma."
The rebirth of cool, indeed.
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