Adolescent slang

Hello everyone,

A final word (at least for now) on language.

When we were all teenagers, we had our slang. Indeed, it was part of our identity as teenagers. It is the nature and disposition of teenagers to rebel and pull themselves away from adults; teenage slang is, at least partly, an effort to define that rebellion.

Adolescent slang could almost be called "cant" (the specialized jargon/slang of the underworld), and cant by its very nature must be fluid and changeable (part if its purpose is to obscure the language to avoid detection).

That means as soon as you turn twenty, you're out of the loop. You're no longer a teenager; the slang has moved on, and you are no longer a native speaker. Before you know it, if you're not careful, you're sounding like a TV commercial using slang from five years ago as if it's current in an effort to sound current, but sounding hopelessly out of date. (Ironically, by the time most adolescent cant/slang reaches the airwaves, it has long ago lost its currency.)

The lesson behind all this is that teachers should not speak to students in their own language. Really.

This is not to say that you shouldn't try to translate something, or that you shouldn't understand what they are saying. Translation is sometimes very useful.

It is also not to say that you should pass up a good, honest, clean laugh when you can get it. I loved to dryly use a slang term that my students didn't know I knew, just for a laugh, or for a funny translation.

My students always thought it was funny if, when they greeted me with a cheery "'Sup, Combe," I said, in an unemotional voice, with perfect diction, something like, "'Sup, Dawg." Or I translated Shakespeare this way: "Romeo is going to, as they say, 'bust a move.'" It didn't remove my status as an old fogey; it just played on the fact that I knew I was an old fogey, and that I was not too much an old fogey to know what they meant. They understood it as a joke, not an attempt to be one of them, and they mostly got a kick out of it.

If you know what "bathos" is (deliberate drop in tone), then you can use it as bathos. (If you don't know, that's all right, too, but I think it's always better in these matters to know what you're doing.)

But if I really try to speak as one of them--thereby trying to become one of them--I will only open myself to all sorts of problems. They have certain expectations of how one speaks when one knows what one is talking about. They don't speak that way; when teachers try to speak like students, it might mean that the teacher doesn't know what the teacher is talking about. Besides, it sounds pathetic whenever someone out of the circle tries too hard to be someone in the circle.

Learn their slang; re-learn it every few years when it changes; understand it; but use it carefully and sparingly. Let them be who they are; you have not been one of them since you turned twenty; it's a mistake to try to be.

Jeff Combe