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Talking about words

Dank slang: two columns from 2003

This companion piece to the March, 2008, Talking About Words is a reprint of two columns from November and December, 2003, issues of Michigan Today.

by Richard W. Bailey

March 11, 2008

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Column 1: Squatchetery

Nothing dates alumni so much as the slang they picked up in college.

An archaeologist carefully brushing away the silt from a prehistoric kitchen midden can look downward into deep time, descending from nails to spear points to fire-hardened sticks. Today's students are embarrassed by a parent who says groovy and intrigued, in a patronizing way, at the grandparent who says swell. Their turn will come when their children smirk at them when they say awesome.

In the 1895-96 school year, a teacher in the rhetoric course at Michigan, Willard Clark Gore, collected nearly a thousand slang terms used by students. He published portions of the list in a Michigan magazine, The Inlander, and thus afforded us hints about the way students talked more than a century ago.

Some of these expressions are entirely familiar today. Students might flunk a quiz in psych or math and afterwards complain to the prof.

But 21st-century students would be at a loss to communicate with their 19th-century counterparts at the corner of State Street and North University Avenue.

Imagine, in 1895, a brick approaching that corner. Let our present-day student appear suddenly and approach the brick who is salamandering along the sidewalk.

Our time-traveler would see at once that this handsome stroller is phat candy. Soon the brick hails a passing co-ed: "Those togs are squatchetery." Entirely bewildered, our traveler squints at The Inlander and finds: "Your new gown is decidedly squatchetery." That example sentence is accompanied by a definition: "admirable, pleasing."

Most of the expressions Gore published are long forgotten: a chiselly day was a cold, overcast, blustery one; a skinchy piece of pie was a stingy slice; collegers at the varsity might be blug (stylish) or skatey (the opposite of blug).

Our visitor would be bewildered by very ideas encased in the slang of the day: hen-medic for a woman in medical school (as opposed to a man-medic), some of them homeops ("students in the homeopathic department').

No longer do hashlets (boarders) put themselves through college by work as a "k. m." (dishwasher < kitchen mechanic). No longer would an especially admired freshlet or soph be described as right as a rabbit.

The initialisms would simply overwhelm our visitor. "What does n. g. mean?" she might ask.

"No good," replies the brick.

"What's a plunk?"

"D. Y. W. Y. K.," says the impatient brick. (Only later by searching in Gore's list would our visitor learn that a plunk is a dollar and D.Y.W.Y.K. means "Don't you wish you knew?")

Our 21st-century student was flummoxed by the 19th-century one and ended up feeling like a yup ("a person of inferior ability," according to Gore).

So to prepare our 19th-century fox for a 21st-century comeuppance, I have made a small inquiry into the slang at Michigan today.

More about that next time.

Column 2: Phat

Last month we sent one of today's students back to 1896 and put her down on the corner of State Street and North University. All she had to guide her was a list of U-M slang expressions compiled and published by a teacher in the rhetoric program back then.

Among the first words she heard was squatchetery, and, by looking at her little glossary, she found out that it meant "admirable, pleasing." It was a good way to begin her visit, but she soon found herself gasping with surprise as she tried to make out what students were saying to each other. Only later did she pick up the idea that blug meant "stylish" and skatey just the opposite.

This month, it's time to return the favor by bringing a male student from 1896 to the same spot in the first decade of the 21st century, and we won't even give him a word list to help. And that modern young woman he'd ridiculed back then for not knowing the latest slang would be there to meet him.

"Squatchetery," she says. "Hah! Phat. That's what squatchetery means. Phat." (Or in other words "good, excellent, cool, wonderful.")

Phat has been around since the 1960s but came into widespread use only in the last decade. Imaginative etymologies abound, beginning with the most obvious, that it is a respelling of fat as in fat cat or fat city. "Pretty hot and tempting" is a definition that treats phat as if it were an acronym; "pretty hot and talented" is another. And there are some obscene etymologies that build on the idea that a phat person is sexually appealing.

"Just a minute," says our present-day student. "I've gotta chirp my friend Courtney." Talking into her cell, she says, "Woot! I've got a gnarly dude over here by the Arcade. I know you're wasting time multislacking on the Net, so you mobilate on down here right now."

So the two women and the visitor went back to Courtney's room, and it's pretty likely that drinkage followed and maybe our visitor had too much and fell asleep crunked up. So we'll send him back home to 1896 only a little the worse for his journey.

Some methods of making slang have arisen in the past century. Acronyms, for instance: abbreviations pronounced as words. But most ways of making slang were in place at the end of the 19th century.

Domains of intense interest to young adults are filled with an abundance of synonyms. In October 2003, I asked 30 students to give me slang terms for "intoxicated." Most listed five or 10 expressions. The words totaled more than 160, but only four were mentioned by more than 10 students each. Nearly all of the students proposed at least one expression that no one else in the group mentioned, suggesting that there are lots of ways to talk about this condition.

Our visitor from 1896 would have understood some of the terms: liquored up or smashed. But most would be mysterious to him: blitzed, crunked or zonked, for instance.

Slang makes creative use of the ways everyone makes words.

• Suffixation: e.g. -tastic (as in cooltastic or craptastic, where the suffix is an intensifier.)
• Shortening: "Whoops, forgot there was a test today...ahh whatev!"
• Blending: "Hey, wanna be in my chicktionary?" (A merger of chick and dictionary for what was earlier known as a "little black book.")
• Shifts from noun to verb: "Don't pick him for our group; he's always lunchin'." (In other words, "not attentive to the task at hand.")

Slang is not made out of necessity but out of exuberance. Nobody needs either squatchetery or phat. But they can have fun with the idea of "very excellent": "That concert was hella tight!"

(Students in my English 309 class and in Prof. Anne Curzan's English 305 contributed significantly to this report.)

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Richard W. Bailey is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn