Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [25]
is constructed of—alright let me take it all the way back to the slave days and use something that’s physical. All the slave masters gave our people straight chitlins and greens, you feel me, stuff that they wasn’t eating. But we made it into a delicacy. Same thing with language . . . .
They didn’t want the slaves playing drums because we was talkin’ through the drums . . . you feel me? So through the music, that’s kinda like going on now with the rap thang. It’s ghetto music. People talkin’ about they issues and crime and, you feel me?
Along the way, hip-hop terms have gone both national and international. Bling-bling even found its way into the linguist’s bible, the Oxford English Dictionary.
FREAKED-OUT VALLEY GIRLS
By the 1980s, the language-generating process shifted briefly to mostly white high school girls in California’s San Fernando Valley who added their own versions of the new lingo with their giggly barf me out, fer sure, as if, and totally, as in “she totally freaks me out.” Subsequent massive usage of the word totally has effectively reduced its wattage close to zero.
Perhaps their greatest single contribution to today’s lingo, however, is the word like. Nobody at the time could have predicted how prevalent this four-letter word would become in the following decades. It was already stretched thin as a noun, verb, adjective, and conjunction. To all these duties, Valspeakers used the word to introduce a quotation, such as, “I was like, ‘What are you doing, girl?’”
A FAMILY WORD GAME
Making up words has become a private joy for many American families. One of the first to notice the tendency was Allen Walker Read who called it “the effervescing of language” in a 1962 article for American Speech, the American Dialect Society’s magazine. More recent is a 2007 book by Paul Dickson, Family Words.17 He lists such gems as mudwaffles (chunks of mud brought into the house on running shoes), lurkin (a single sock whose mate is lurkin’ around somewhere), granny hangers (loose flaps of skin hanging from an old person’s upper arm), rump spring (an old stuffed chair with a spring showing through), and garpe (one family’s name for grape jelly because of a misspelling on a shopping list).
These high-pitched contributions to the language were, like, immortalized in the 1983 movie Valley Girl, which by now seems “so yesterday,” a further bit of Valspeak. Just as Valspeak was dying out in 1995, another movie, Clueless, revived it briefly with a printed guide to the movie’s slang. The film added the ubiquitous whatever and helped to consolidate the ever-present like and you know in the nation’s vocabulary.
Seeking to capitalize on the informal language trend, Steve Jobs, the clued-in chief of Apple, launched his famed Think Different ad slogan in 1997. His willingness to risk offending savvy tech buyers with this questionable grammar proved to be a smash hit. By this time, few could have been offended by the ploy pioneered earlier by Winston cigarettes.
COSBY’S COMPLAINT
After 2000, hip-hop sales dropped significantly while many critics cited a deterioration in the lyrics and an increase in raunchiness and misogyny. An even bigger decline in sales in 2005 might have been sparked by professional funny guy Bill Cosby. The wildly popular African-American TV star, who has a master’s degree in education, blew his top in a 2004 speech at Howard University at a ceremony honoring the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation.
“Just forget about telling your child to go to the Peace Corps,” he said. “It’s standing on the corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk. ‘Why you ain’t?’ ‘Where you is?’ . . . I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father.”
He said it wasn’t like this when he was growing