Slang: A rose by any other name......oh yeah!

I got to thinking about slang and cultural expressions. We have terms that are terribly confusing to new English speakers.

Once at my children’s elementary school -- which had at that time about a sixty per cent ESL population -- puzzled new Canadian parents were told in a notice to bring a “brown bag lunch.”  WTF?   [And is there a Chinese or Spanish, Estonian or Tahitian expression for WTF?]

What do new English-speakers make of expressions like “cooking the books,” ... “flatliners,” ... or “bling bling?” How on earth would a new English speaker translate these into anything comprehensible?

That got me wondering what kind of things people speaking other languages devleoped slang expressions around. Ah, Google:  “slang in other languages:”

Herbert Giles on the World Wide School website has a few examples of Chinese slang. Three thousand years of creative language mangling:

·   A flowery bill:  “A flowery bill is understood from one end of China to the other as that particular kind in which our native servants delight to indulge, namely, an account charging twice as much for everything as was really paid, and containing twice as much in quantity as was actually supplied.”

·   He’s all rice-water:  “He's all rice-water, i.e., gives one plenty of the water in which rice has been boiled, but none of the rice itself, is said of a man who promises much and does nothing.”

Wikipedia says that Mandarin slang is different and “consists of many slang words and insults involving sex.”  Interesting. A few examples from the article on Mandarin slang:   

·   Bad egg:  Huàidàn (壞蛋/坏蛋).

·    jībā (simplified Chinese:)  鸡巴 (traditional Chinese: )  雞巴/鷄巴, IM abbreviation: J8/G8) = cock (used as early as the Yuan Dynasty  and 11 different slangs for penis and 12 for vagina in Mandarin in case you’re interested.

·   qù nǐde (Chinese:)  去你的) = fuck off/shut the fuck up (milder).

And this may be useful for North American youth to incorporate into their repertoire of swears. Made in Taiwan:

·   wǒ kào (我靠 or 我尻) – "Well fuck me!", "Fuck!", "Fuckin' awesome!" or "Holy shit!" (Originally from Taiwan, this expression has spread to the mainland, where it is generally not considered to be vulgar. 尻 originally meant "butt.")

And how many centuries we’ve been picking on the poor beleagured male member:

·   diǎo (屌) / niǎo (simplified Chinese: 鸟; traditional: 鳥) = cock; this was an insult as long ago as the Jin Dynasty.  Now it sometimes also means "fucking cool" or "fucking outrageous", thanks in large part to the pop star Jay Chou "鸟人" (bird man) sometimes has a derogative meaning as a "wretch", but also often used between close friends as affectionate appellation like "fellow."

This Wikipedia article is absolutely fascinating. Seems people ahve been saying "no shit" for eons, and telling others to eff-off since forever. Some very "questionable" words here at ChinaSmack. 

But I was more interested in daily usage kind of slang, the kind we use at work -- an abbreviationary type of the vernacular.  Finding that is a bit more of a challenge.

I found BuzzWhack, a dictionary of buzzwords 

• (buzz.whack.er (buz´wak er) n. A person who receives some degree of pleasure in bursting the bubbles of the pompous.)  Very interesting and amusing and like most techno/slang, to the point.

But how to find these expressions in other languages?

The Australians are pretty good at it.  Islands are a great place to grow buzz and slang, from the Australian Dictionary of Slang.  There’s  

• bludger; 
• earbash; 
• on a good lurk; 
• open slather;
• spit the dummy; 
• wanker;
• the wedding tackle;
•  and from the Aussies we also got those old familiars: cakehole, butt, chinwag and cockeyed, crapper (which they may have borrowed from the Brits) and many more lyrical mouthfuls all in “strine” (strine = Aussie English).

That’s more like it.

The Americans seem very good at generating new words, slang, buzz words, and all sorts of language playfuls. But maybe that’s only because I watch their TV and other nations are equally as creative with their languages.

Proverbs are another way at getting how a culture thinks about things.  Given the human experience is universal, you’d expect there would be crossover on proverbs in all cultures.  Here’s Spanish proverbs  and sure enough we find those old chestnuts:

·   Don't look a gift horse in the mouth - A caballo regalado no se le miran los dientes;

·   A man's home is his castle - A cada nidito le gusta su pajarito (lit.: each little bird likes his small nest; n.b.: Mexican saying)

But here’s one that’s kind of culturally specific:

·     A mule and a woman must be defeated with blows from sticks - A la mula y a la mujer, a palos se ha de vencer. (n.b.: a Mexican saying; probably not the best approach with women)

Most of them were all the same old tired clichéd proverbs, but this one was new to me:

·   Hunger is the best sauce - A mucha hambre, no hay pan duro (lit.: when very hungry, there is no hard/stale bread).

The Spanish had longer listings for slang than any other country listed.

The Italians have been swearing at each other for centuries.  The BBC has come up with some “cool” Italian slang in English. All divided into categories. The “Pulling” list (?) has all sorts of classifications of men’s and women’s attractiveness:

• Un rospo - Lit. a toad. An ugly, unattractive girl; un ciospo - an ugly, unattractive guy.  Un bel tipo - a handsome guy) and 4 lyrical terms for condoms;

then Interjections from  

• Merda! (shit; but not as rude as in English they say) to  
• boh! (I don’t know and I don’t care--you shrug with this one).

Slang evidently isn’t just generated by countries and cultures; it’s also generated by being a roadie, by subcultures, dialect, sexual orientation, military special forces [recon, civvies, black bird etc.]; crimes and prisons, illicit substances, all of which you can review at http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/links.htm

My nomination for most creative and funnest slang dictionary. Strafe’s Guide. Computer/ internet slang. Some creative self-mocking gems:

·   aardvarking - v. Having sex with an ex just because both of you have nothing or no one better to do.

·   rasterbator - n. 1. A compulsive computer user. 2. Someone who has an hyper-inflated opinion of their own digital work.

·    etch-a-sketch - v. Trying to draw a smile on a woman's face by twiddling both of her nipples simultaneously.

·   badd ass pipe - n. A high-bandwidth Internet connection. Also see riding glass, squirt the bird.

·   wankware - n. X-rated software.

·   hurl -  v. To email only URLs with no accompanying commentary.

·   Would you like fries with that? - exclm. Ironic reply to someone who asks you to do something that is a complete waste of your training, talent, education or experience. Also see I don't make the fries.

Kind of amazing how evocative and creative with language these pixel monkeys have been. And we thought they couldn’t even spell!

The ultimate compendium of worldly worldwide slang - the ForeignSlang Dictionaries online.

Language and expression, like everything else, is ultimately going to morph and change; after all, it's fúyún. 

Bah humbug Dole and Bengard

I was delighted to be able to buy cauliflowers this summer at the farmers’ market for an “each” price.  

I hate buying a cauliflower and paying really top prices like $1.99 a pound, and then I open it up and find that fully one-third of it is waste and which bumps the price up to about $2.50 a pound. For a cauliflower! C'mon, a cauliflower.

I’ve found this with Dole cauliflowers and Bengard caulies which are from Salinas CA. What a scam.

I wrote to the president of Safeway: I'd much rather you took your suppliers on, and got your customers a better deal on cauliflowers. Much better you spent your time on that, than coming up with stuff like that phony-baloney campaign where you  make your overworked cashiers pause after they print it out the bill, find our names in that weird light blue, almost unreadable, ink and say, “Thank you Mrs. So & So.  Have-a-good-one!”

Please.

They don’t have a clue who I am, and neither of us cares. You are not my friendly neighbourhood greengrocer: you're a giant multinat, so let's drop the pretense that your cashier is ever going to remember me when I go back.

I’d much rather have 75 cents a pound off my cauliflower, Mr. President. You could say: "Look here, Dole: cut some of that greenage off the cauliflowers eady. I don't want my  customers paying for greenage they have to toss in the trash."

But no.

He never bothered to write back.