Slang UCLA style

By Karen Duryea
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

A pump and a quiver, ace, aggro, airhead, airtight, all (as in
be all, be all like etc.) and all-nighter.

Are you down with that? Because these are the first seven words
found in "U.C.L.A. Slang 2 ," a dictionary written by 25 students
from UCLA. But it’s OK if you don’t understand, the book was
published in 1993, and, like, for sure, the slang has changed since
then.

UCLA Professor of Linguistics Pamela Munro is familiar with the
ephemeral-nature of today’s college slang ­ she teaches
Linguistics 88A, a lower division seminar dedicated to the study of
slang. She has taught the course twice before, once in 1988 and
also in 1992, which resulted in dictionaries with full entries of
slang words, including parts of speech, and many even with an
example of its use in a sentence.

"It could be as much as one week that a slang word is used, up
to a hundred years," said Munro, a graduate of Stanford University
and UCSD. "Some say they change really fast, and some words people
were using before your parents were your age."

Using the slang word "cool" as an example, Munro says it is
still used today, despite it’s fluctuating popularity. It began as
a common slang term in the 1950s.

Munro isn’t all slang however. She spends much of her time
concentrating on American Indian languages. Her mentor is Edward
Sapir, who she says is one of the greatest American linguists of
the 20th century.

An enlarged black-and-white photo of Sapir hangs in Munro’s
office. Her faculty advisor in college was one of Sapir’s
students.

"Linguistics is a weird, in-groupy field," Munro said. "We like
to trace our ancestry, he’s like my great-grandfather."

Munro began her interest in studying slang when she met Connie
Eble, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill at a linguistics conference. Eble publishes a new paper almost
every year, discussing slang used by students at U.N.C.

Eble’s work interested Munro, and from there, she began a
project in which she asks students in Linguistics 110A to submit
slang expressions. The first time she intensively looked at the
words was in 1988.

"We pushed at finding a good, exact definition," she said. "You
get a clearer definition of the word if you talk about it," she
said.

Her Linguistics 88A seminar has only met twice so far this
quarter, and yesterday, students submitted four or five slang
expressions to discuss later in class.

"Most of the definitions of the words will change (when they
talk about it)," she said. "Other people have different things to
contribute."

Munro makes note of the backgrounds of the students in her
class, since each student has a different angle to offer.

"Slang is so neat because people use slang expressions to define
who they are … how they feel about themselves."

One of the obstacles Munro has faced in approaching a subject
like slang is that often the words used in class discussions are
offensive. She makes the first move in helping students to open
up.

Today, she brought up the slang term "bitch," a word that many
people are offended by and disagree upon its meaning.

"I brought it up, and I knew it would get people talking … It
happens naturally, eventually people will want to talk about
(controversial words)," she said.

The actual definition of slang, according to the Encyclopedia
Britannica is, "consisting basically of unconventional words and
phrases that express either something new or something old in a new
way."

However, Munro says that everyone has an idea of what slang is,
but still it is difficult to define. She didn’t want to reveal her
definition, since that will be a future assignment for her students
to discover on their own.

New words come about in various ways, says Case Western Reserve
University’s Associate Professor Emeritus of English Prosanta Saha.
There are a "dozen ways" slang words originate, he said.

In the dictionary "Slang and Euphemism," by Northwestern
University Associate Professor of Linguistics Richard A. Spears, he
describes the increase of slang use as a product of the 60s free
speech movement.

But Munro is emphatic that slang use is not increasing.

"Everybody always feels there is more slang," she said. "If that
were the case, nobody would be using the standard English language
now."

In the first study done by her and her students in 1988, the
terms that generated the most slang terms were the actions of
throwing up, being drunk, and having sex.

"Barfing, boozing and boffing," respectively, was what the media
then referred to as the lifestyle of UCLA students after the first
publication of UCLA Slang , which was then turned into a commercial
publication called "Slang U."

The publication received media attention from Rolling Stone,
Newsweek and USA Today.

Despite some individual’s sensitivity to slang, Munro thinks
slang is only rude when hoarded to oneself.

"It may be rude if it excludes the other person," she said. "If
you were using terms that they couldn’t understand, then it might
be inappropriate."