Language
Slang
The abbrevs are my plezh
Jan 23rd 2012, 20:51 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
FOR those alarmed at yesterday's peeving, today's post will be a celebration of teenage slang. A few posts in the linguablogosphere have recently checked in on teenage shortenings: Stan Carey ("Ledgebag is totes amaze") here, and Ben Yagoda ("Totes cray-cray abbrevs") here. Mr Carey is broadly admiring, Mr Yagoda slightly dismayed.
Mr Carey's post got me noticing that many of these fanciful abbrevs end in consonants pronounced in the same place— they're "voiced postalveolar fricatives", with the tongue behind the alveolar ridge and the vocal cords vibrating. Here they are, with International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, and an English approximation:
ʒ or "zh": plezh ("my plezh", my pleasure), uzhe ("the uzhe", the usual), cazh ("totes cazh", very casual)
dʒ or "dzh": ledge ("legend"), dodge ("dodgy"), tradge ("tragic")
Maybe cutting words off at these sounds is a little more common because the results are simply funny. Not that many English words end in ʒ or dʒ, and many of those that do have a bit of a silly ring: cadge, smidge, smudge, drudge, hodge-podge, fridge and such sit alongside a few respectable words like bridge and ridge and dredge. Even fewer words end in ʒ than in dʒ, and tend to be French borrowings or produced by the -age suffix borrowed from Old French: mirage, dressage, frottage, arbitrage...
So my guess is that it's fun to end a word in ʒ or dʒ just because English doesn't do so very often. As for Mr Yagoda's dismay, I just can't share it. Teens play with the language not out of a desire for efficiency ("some of these 'abbreviations' aren't even shorter!") but because it's fun.
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I am curious how has teenage slang become more uniform because of the Internet.
Ʒ is a fairly rare phoneme in English, and therefore frequently occurs in words that are easily recognizable when you get to the ʒ.
Final syllables are often disposable that way, which is why loss of final syllables (including inflectional suffixes, of course) is one of the most common kinds of language change.
The French are even worse than the Anglo-Saxons in that respect. Among my favourite abbreviations there is of course the well known "Macdo" for an American chain of fast food restaurants.
The French also have abbreviations that aren't shorter than the originals, such as "cantoche" for "cantine" or abbreviation that cut from the beginning, such as 'dwich for sandwich.
plezh ("my plezh", my pleasure), uzhe ("the uzhe", the usual), cazh ("totes cazh", very casual)
I've been seeing these kind of words crop up and couldn't for the life of me work out what they meant, especially "totes cazh"! Time for the pipe and slippers, methinks.
To add from another subculture you may not be familiar with, Mormon missionaries (by definition young men aged 19 to 21) call their mission "the mish" and their bishop "the bish".
(my current favu abbrev is "prolly" for "probably")
That one's actually been around a long time, I think I remember reading it in old comics...doing a google book search turns up examples going back to the 1940s, at least: http://books.google.com/books?id=9N0QAAAAMAAJ&q=prolly#search_anchor
As someone who graduated high-school in the sweet-spot of technological history when 300 and 1200 baud modems were just becoming cheap enough for home use, I can say for sure that "the kids" have been playing with the language over the technological medium for at least 25 years.
My favorite abbreviation slang from "way back when" was ~9w~ (prounounced out loud as a "flying nine wuh"), which was a sarcastic form of "wow" whose progression at birth was:
wow -> w0w -> w9w -> 9w -> ~9w~
English is joyful sillyputty and really always has been. I blame Noah Webster for this insipid idea that we need to lock it down to protect the children (or protect us from them).
Abso totes, that's a great observation about the attraction of /ʒ/ and /dʒ/.
I'm delighted that some people realise that the main part of using abbrevos and slang is to just have a big laugh. My trouble is convincing fellow linguists of that fact. I'm no teenager but I'm well aware that kids provide us with raw materials for language play. The way to deal with it seems to be to listen in, absorb it and gradually incorporate the new words and phrases AS A PISS TAKE, until you find your own uses for them.
As for /ʒ/ a genuine phonetic reason for ending words there is because of the prosodic environment it tends to occurs in - at the syllabic juncture between a stressed and unstressed syllable. Unstressed syllables are what get lopped off in abbrevos, and the those syllables are often near-redundant morphemes, such as {-al}, {-ic}, {-ion}. These bits are boring and you can get away with omitting them, leaving the words more meaty and fun.
Finally, I wonder why there has been a massive shift in slang in recent years towards adjectives and adverbs? They're not the kind of words that traditionally receive much attention in slang.
And part of the reason that they are fun (and attractive) is that they seem to put up a barrier to outsiders (especially parents). At best, the outsiders don't understand; at worst, the understand, but are so busy being offended that they miss the meaning.
i guess teens like the verbiage
"some of these 'abbreviations' arent' even shorter!"
I call Muphry's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
Typo fixed. Doesn't Muphry's Law only apply when someone is ranting about someone else's sloppiness? Here I am celebrating the kids...
"Maybe cutting words off at these sounds is a little more common because the results are simply funny. "
That an the umbrella influence of texting and tweeting.
ur so funneh teh LOLs!
Is it bad that I say "totes amaze"? Alas, I am no longer a teenager...
One of my FB friends is the (French) wife of my (Anglo-French) first cousin once removed. A recent comment on her FB page reads:
"A bientôt viens dej quand tu as le temps..."
Does 'dej' in French signify some sort of a parallel abbreviating trend to Johnson's quote of 'plezh' in English?
And the comments on her FB page are full of 'c' (abbreviating 'c'est').
I'm not sure what the context is, considering there isn't much punctuation here, but I'm i'm interpreting correctly you are right. It sounds like she's shortening the word "déjà" and just saying dej. There is also a possibility she means "déjeuner" which means lunch. Then again, I don't know how their relationship is, so I can't tell for sure. Hope that helped!
It means "come and have lunch". Breakfast is often similarly abbreviated to le "petit déj".
French SMS–speak is rife with these abbreviation. "J'ai" becomes "G", "de" is "2" etc. Here's a useful reference: http://french.about.com/library/writing/bl-texting.htm
If such abbreviations didn't annoy people like Mr Yagoda, they wouldn't be nearly as popular.