Whether you’re headed off to a new school or starting a new job, there’s always new lingo to learn.
This may be especially true of environments where there are lots of young people, who tend to have slang that’s all their own. Don’t worry though, Huffington Post has the “Ultimate College Dictionary”, just for you!
Here’s a couple of examples to get you started:
Darty (or Day-long): A party occurring during the day (aka an excuse to rage in broad daylight). At many college campuses, darty or day-long season begins in early spring, when the weather starts to warm up, and typically ends right before finals start.
Kegs & Eggs: A morning keg party. These parties usually begin before daybreak (around 6 a.m.) and last until noon or later. Another version is finishing off the keg used at a party the night before while eating eggs.
You may have heard the recent news that Scrabble is adding nearly 3,000 new words to a lexicon, including some slang terms. But don’t be afraid: they’re only for use outside of North America.
Collins Official Scrabble Words governs play outside of North America, whilst in the US and Canada competitive Scrabble is
ruled by a book known as the Official Tournament and Club Word List, or OWL (along with an addendum of 10- to 15-letter words known as The Long List. The over-the-counter source for school and home play, purged of “offensive” words, is The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. The North American lexicons are published by Merriam-Webster. (Source: Slate)
Wondering what’s the difference between the two lexicons? Apparently the British version is “larger and more permissive” than the North American – larger by 267,751 words to the OWLs 178,691. Take a look at the rest of the article for more Scrabble trivia.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is recruiting speakers of ‘street slang’, according to an article in the Guardian today.
Apparently the DEA is hiring nine people who understand black vernacular English to translate wiretaps and stand up evidence in court. Ebonics is the term coined in the mid-1970s to describe US black vernacular English, and is sometimes dismissed as slang rather than a language.
American officials have in the past denied that there is any such thing at Ebonics.
“A lot of times people think you’re just dealing with a few slang words, and that you can finesse your way around it,” John Rickford, a Stanford University linguistics professor, told the Associated Press. “And it’s not – it’s a big vocabulary. You’ll have some significant differences.”
Although Ebonics has been rejected as a concept by many scholars, it drew nationwide attention in 1996 when a school board in Oakland, California decided to recognise it as a primary language and to offer instruction. (Source: The Guardian)
The acclaimed television series The Wire is a famed for its impenetrable language, which includes the use of street slang.
But Ebonics isn’t the only language the DEA is recruiting translators for – it’s also seeking people fluent in such diverse languages as Farsi, Baloch (an Iranian language), Chimora (from Guam) and Norweigan. It just goes to show what a range of languages are spoken in the United States!
With ever-evolving technology, it can be hard to keep up with the latest vocabulary used to describe it. This helpful article points out 25 tech words you need to know. The most interesting is probably mesofact – a fact that slowly evolves over time.
This challenges our conceptions of what a fact is – it is conventionally defined as “something that actually exists; reality, truth” and we probably think of facts as being hard, unchanging information. A mesofact however is something that exists, but is changing.
Mesofact
A mesofact is a fact that is slowly evolving over time. For example, the term “national healthcare” might have one meaning at first, but slowly evolves to become more concrete, as the actual laws emerge. Original use: on Wikipedia, users often add more detail to an entry as the original meaning and facts evolve.
Here are some other words that caught my eye:
Thumbo
Posted as a new slang term on Wordspy.com, a thumbo is a mistake made when you are typing with your thumbs — on a BlackBerry or other smartphone.
Vook
Books are so 2008. This year, a new concept called a vook is emerging — a book that includes video snippets. The Apple iPad will help make vooks a reality as more of us use slim and light Internet tablets to read and browse the Web.
Dittoism
According to Doubletongued, a dittoism is defined as a penchant for Internet users to agree on the same topic only because that’s the established norm. For example, when most reviewers ranked the new Apple iPad as revolutionary, a dittoism is that everyone agrees, even without trying one.
