“It comes from the mistyping of ‘owned’ on some computer game,” as in “I just owned you,” he said.Īnd the site Gawker recently tried without success to ban the phrase “I’m just sayin,’ ” which has become ubiquitous on blogs and Twitter as a way of defanging disingenuously, perhaps a potentially confrontational statement. But Professor Leonard cites “pwned” (rhymes with owned) as a relatively recent invention that is already falling out of favor with the gaming crowd that coined it. Tracking a word’s arc from hip to lame is notoriously difficult, especially because different social groups grab hold of different terms at different times. “The difference now is it takes 20 to 30 hours.” “Now, with the Internet, you just put something up on Facebook and say ‘send me in your slang terms,’ and in a few days you have hundreds of examples and the ability to check it out with other readers.”īack then, “it took 20, 30 years to cross the Atlantic,“ he said. “It used to be that the guys who did all the slang dictionaries would take years just to track it down,” said David Crystal, a linguist who has written more than 30 books. Slang 6.” While slang dictionaries have been around in one form or another since the 18th century, they now number more than a dozen in print, to say nothing of online resources like and that are updated hundreds of times daily.
Part of the problem is that electronic media are making it too easy to compile dictionaries like “U.C.L.A.
“If you are in a real inside group, you are manufacturing slang so that you can exclude the wannabes.”Īnd that becomes harder, he added, as the whole world has access to your language. Leonard, a linguistics professor at Hofstra in Hempstead, N.Y., whose slang credentials include being a founding member of the doo-wop group Sha Na Na, formed in the late 1960s. The Internet “is robbing slang of a lot of its sociolinguistic exclusionary power,” said Robert A.
#Lame meaning in text code
The life of slang is now shorter than ever, say linguists, and what was once a reliable code for identifying members of an in-group or subculture is losing some of its magic.
The number of slang dictionaries is growing, both online and off, not to mention social networking media that invent and discard words, phrases and memes at the speed of broadband. What’s a hipster (hepcat?) to do? Keeping up with the latest slang is at once easier and harder than ever.
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