Totes Check It

I'm just going to go ahead and post the entire text of one of William Safire's latest On Language columns here. It usually appears in the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It's a good one.

Sketchy about the lingo being spoken by today’s adultalescents? As those in their late teens and early adulthood like to say, Ah-ite!

The sound of that last word is hard to convey on the printed page. The famous cry in comic books of a man being thrown out a window — Ai-ee-ee! — comes closer to the first semisyllable of the slurred word, but there is a hint of a t at the end. When you ask a young person conversant in this campuspeak (a word created on the analogy of George Orwell’s newspeak) a question like “Would you do this for me?” you are likely to hear the answer “Ah-ite.”

The meaning is “O.K.” The sound is an amalgam of all and right, which used to sound like “aw-rite” but now is compressed into a sliding “a’ight,” as the teen-slanguist Fred Lynch transcribes it.

Word-blending is big in campuspeak. “He’s sort of a nerd, but he’s just so adorkable” combines adorable with dork, the amalgam defined as “endearing though socially inept” by Prof. Connie Eble of the department of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Another blend is fauxhawk, combining faux, “artificial,” and Mohawk, defined as a “hairstyle achieved by combing all of the hair to the center to give the appearance of a Mohawk without shaving the head.”

Yet another is ginormous, blending gigantic with enormous (seeking to outstrip humongous, itself a dated slang blend of huge and monstrous and/or tremendous). The new slang blend submitted by members of Professor Eble’s English 314 class only a few months ago is chillax, from the adjective chill, “easygoing,” and the verb relax, the combo meaning “do nothing in particular,” an activity widely practiced in centers of learning throughout the nation.

Among the relatively new slang words: stella, “good-looking female,” from stellar, “starlike,” improbably influenced by the shouted name of Stanley Kowalski’s wife in Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire.” A synonym is shorty or shawty, imported from vintage hip-hop for “girlfriend of any height.” Such attractiveness is the opposite of the fast-fading butterface (“Great body, but her face. . . .”), and a less-than-good-looking male or female is a blockamore, who “only looks good from a block or more.”

Metaphor is teen slang at its most creative. The recent nose wide open, applied to either male or female friends, means “totally compliant,” perhaps from the older “to be led around by the nose.” (This is not to be confused with the Shakespearean Henry V’s exhortation to his troops going into battle at Harfleur to “set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide.” The current slang synonym for the subservient shlepper is sprung.)

A rhyming metaphor is thigh five, “a celebratory gesture like a high five, except clapping together the fronts of the thighs, as football players do, instead of the palms of the hands.”

The most frequently used new term at Chapel Hill is sketchy, “of dubious character; shady, potentially dangerous.” Usage: “Those middle-aged men are so sketchy. They creep me out.” It is being substituted for the long-lasting ninja of the 1980s, from the Japanese for “stealthy, secretive.” Yesteryear’s in your face has been replaced by all up in your grill. Sources elsewhere tell me that the adjective crunchy applied to health-conscious, environmentally correct types is being overtaken by the attributive noun granola. Anyhoo (nobody says “anyhow” anymoo), at Rice University the blended compound adultalescence has for the past few years been defined as “the state of moving back in with one’s parents after college graduation.”

Other youthful slang sources concern themselves mainly with the vocabulary of the three subjects, other than scholarship and sports, apparently central to campus life: sex, booze and regurgitation. (If your response to that news is Duh, the latest definition of that sound is “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”)

I am not about to yam on (“humiliate”) readers with a lexicon of making purple or doing the do other than to note that the most original compound along the amatory line is the verb sexile, defined as “being locked out by your roommate who is using the premises for an assignation to which you are not invited.” This is somehow related to hallcest, the definition of which has not been vouchsafed to me, but I suspect it is an extreme example of what diplomats call “proximity talks.”