Part of the most populous generation in
American history, a baby boomer (we'll
call her Boomer for short) entered the
earthly stage in 1950. During the first
decade of her life, she was unaware that
a multitude of brave new words were
making their way into her world and
becoming enshrined in American English
dictionaries -- air show, desegregation,
carbon dating, egg cream, hi-fi, H-bomb,
idiot box, jet set, junk mail, karate,
knee-jerk, Little League, nerd,
overkill, panic button, quantum leap,
queen-size, show-and-tell, snow blower,
tank top, urban sprawl, veggies,
wash-and-wear, world-class, and yellow
pages.
But as she became an adult, then a
soccer mom, and, ultimately, an
empty-nester, she began to realize that
a gazillion neologisms -- around five
thousand new words each year! -- were
altering the way she looked at the world
and occasionally requiring a reality
check. Stressed out from life in the
fast track spent networking with
yuppies, yumpies, and dinks, she
disconnected her cellular phone and paid
some megabucks to go to a fat farm.
Feeling like a couch potato, she stopped
her feeding frenzies and gave the high
five to grazing on nouvelle cuisine.
As newly minted words added to the
currency of the language of the wicked
awesome 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s,
Boomer felt as if she was having a
bad-hair day every day in a world in
which the parts of speech and meanings
of words transmogrified under her very
eyes and ears. FAX, Fedex, microwave,
scroll, and Xerox had turned into verbs,
and Bill Murray got slimed in the 1984
blockbuster Ghostbusters. Crack meant
more than just a small opening, and ice
more than frozen water, and going postal
became not just a decision to mail a
letter.
A pocket wasn't just for
pants, and a bar code was no longer just
ethics for lawyers or the etiquette of
behavior in a cafe, and rap wasn't just
'60s talk. Zapping was not something
that futuristic ray guns did but
something that people did with a
microwave or a television remote control
(along with surfing). A set point was no
longer just a tennis score, and spin was
not just what a tennis ball did,
especially in the hands of the spin
doctors.
IRA no longer stood just for
"Irish Republican Army," CD s were no
longer just certificates, and PC came to
signify both personal computer and
politically correct.
A pound was no longer just a unit of
currency or measurement but, in the
words of James J. Kilpatrick, my
colleague in columny, "the little
thingamajig above the 3 on a standard
typewriter or computer keyboard. It
looks like a blank tic tac toe game that
has had too much to drink."
Known as "elephant's ear" in Sweden,
"small snail" in France and Italy, "cat
tail" in Finland, "monkey tail" in
Holland, "spider monkey" in Germany,
"cinnamon cake" in Norway, "little dog"
in Russia, and "shtrudel" in Israel, the
@ -- or "at-sign" -- has become a
standard symbol in electronic addresses.
Used for centuries in the sense of "each
at the price of," the @ has taken on the
locative sense of "at."
In fact, the hot new technology of the
computer thoroughly befuddled the
meanings of back up, bit, boot, browser,
crash, disk, dot, hacker, hard drive,
hit, mail, memory, menu, mouse, net,
park, prompt, provider, scroll, spam,
surf, virus, Web site (no longer just
where Charlotte lives), and window. As
the wonders of the computer impacted on
her mind, she acquired a new
user-friendly vocabulary: clip art,
desktop publishing, emoticon, floppy
disk, ink-jet, Internet, keypad, kludge,
laptop, morphing, mouse potato (a couch
potato attached to a computer), number
crunching, software, spreadsheet, and
voice recognition.
To add to these
sound bytes, bit-map, chat room, HTML,
home page, netiquette, netizen, URL,
VCR, World Wide Web, zettabyte -- and,
of course, millennium bug (shortened to
Y2K) -- all debuted in dictionaries in
the 1990s.
No wonder that Boomer began feeling like
a dissed gomer, dumbed-down dweeb,
bummed out newbie, totally loose cannon,
and ditzy airhead.
As the Me Generation (a term invented by
the writer Tom Wolfe) grew up and
grayed, our disoriented Boomer found
that the business of America appeared to
be business, and the business of
business was to devise a lexicon of new
terms to describe new fiscal realities.
The second half of the twentieth century
was a "golden" age of commerce -- golden
handshakes, golden hellos, and golden
parachutes.
The increasingly
proactive world of business also gave us
ATMs, baby Bells, bank card, debit card,
domestic partner, entry level, Euro
dollar, family leave, glass ceiling,
intrapreneurs, maxed out, pink collar,
PIN, power breakfasts and power lunches,
and power ties, program trading, quality
circles, queen bees, telemarketing, and
white knights.
But Boomer found that life among the
movers and shakers was fraught with the
perils of greenmail, hostile takeovers,
junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, and
poison pills. It was also a decade of
considerable monkey business --
sleazebags and sleazeballs engaging in
insider trading, often leaving paper
trails that led to smoking guns and
white collar prisons.
Boomer was
bombarded with hundreds of high-tech
brave new words for a brave new world of
science and technology. She found
herself playing telephone tag with such
cutting edge dictionary entries as
blusher, bullet train, call forwarding
and call waiting, CAT scan, COBOL, cold
fusion, faux pearls (and faux anything
else), fiber-optic, fuzz-buster, global
warming, greenhouse effect, laser,
makeover, meltdown, microwaveable,
nuclear winter, quark, super collider,
tanning booth (and bed ), voice
activated, voice mail (a new oxymoron),
and voiceprint.
As Boomer grew up, she found that
medical breakthroughs broke into the
headlines almost every day: alternative
medicine, arthroscopy, attention deficit
disorder, bikini cut, genetic
counseling, geriatrician, ibuprofen, in
vitro fertilization, liposuction, liquid
diet, live liver donor transplant, Lyme
disease, mad cow disease, minoxidil,
passive smoking, PMS, product tampering,
Prozac, seasonal affective disorder
(which yields the bacronym SAD),
sunblock, taxol, and toxic shock
syndrome.
For a while, she joined the
fitness craze and became a triathlete
who built up her abs and glutes with
low-impact aerobics, aquacise,
dancercise, and jazzercise.
At the same time, Boomer was troubled by
the spread of AIDS drugs through the
decade and the population -- ARC, AZT,
HIV complex, homophobia, and safe sex
(had it ever been safe?); crackhead,
crackhouse, freebase, gateway drug, ice,
and narcoterrorism.
Our Boomer became swept up in an age
marked by considerable political and
social change, and this change in turn
left its mark on the American language
-- action clothing, Afrocentric, bag
lady, blended family, carjacking,
charter school, codependent, condo
conversion, Contra, co-parent,
designated driver, designer jeans
(genes, or anything else), distance
learning, disinformation, Ebonics, exit
poll, extended care, gentrification,
gerontocracy, glasnost, global village,
gridlock, happy hour (which usually
lasts longer than an hour), health spa,
high top, homeschooler, Kwanza, mall
rat, managed care, no-growth, quality
time, POSSLQ, rust belt (or bowl),
seatbelt laws, significant other, single
parent, singles bar, stepfamily,
superfund, surrogate mother, touchy
feelie, and trophy wife.
Boomer learned to come to terms with
glitzy, in-your-face new entertainment
terms, such as acid rock, action figure,
boom box, breakdancing, bungee jumping,
cable-ready, camcorder, channel surfing,
clear channel, colorization, closed and
open captioned, docudrama and
documusical, extreme sports, gangsta
rap, ghetto blasters, hackysack, high
top, infotainment, laser and compact
disks, line dancing, MTV, new wave
music, new age anything, road rage, slam
dunk, snowboarding, sound bite,
snowboarding, televangelist, ten-speed,
and veejay.
Lucky Boomer. Throughout her life, a
growing interest by foodies in ethnic
and regional cuisine added a menu of new
words to the American palate, food
court, and vocabulary. The American
obsession with food is reflected in the
neologisms bagel chips and bagel dogs,
biscotti, blush wine, brew decaf,
buffalo wings, callaloo, chimichanga,
corn dog, enoki, fajita, farfalle,
frozen yogurt, green goddess dressing,
ice wine, latte, mesclun, microbrew, oat
bran, primavera, ranch dressing, sea
legs, shiitaki, smoothie, surimi, and
wine coolers -- many of which are
comfort foods, not junk foods. Boomer
wasn't really distraught, and certainly
wasn't ready to quit the day job or go
postal or ballistic.
In fact, this
whole business of linguistic change was
a no-brainer to her. She knew that, just
as one never steps into the same river
twice, one cannot step into the same
language twice -- that, even as one
enters, the words are swept downstream
into the future, forever making a
different river.
Or, to switch the
metaphor, she knew that language is like
a tree that sheds its leaves and grows
new ones so that it may live on. Changes
in our vocabulary occur not from decay
or degeneration. Rather, new words, like
new leaves, are essential to a living,
healthy organism. A language draws its
nutrients from the environment in which
its speakers live.
Throughout
history, as people have met with new
objects, experiences, and ideas, they
have needed new words to describe them.
During the second half of the twentieth
century, the tree of American English
experienced a riot of new growth -- a
sign that our multifoliate language is
deeply rooted in the nourishing soil of
change.
BOOMERSPEAK
Bart Simpson
gave us "chill out," and "rad, man"; but
"Don't have a cow, man" came long before
Bart Simpson was an ink spot on the
drawing board.
Bart also uses the term "far out"; but
he did not originate it, nor did he make
it mainstream. Back in the early 70's, John
Denver hosted "The Tonight
Show" for a week or so. Apparently it
takes far more than songwriting skills
to serve as an articulate host. Every
time John was excited or amazed, his
eyes would open wide, and he'd blurt
out, "Far out!" Well, it did not take
long before the audience got ahead of
him. Given just a short pause in the
dialog, the audience filled in the
blanks for him: "Far out!" Twenty-five
years later he commented that that term
still follows him around.
The term
"hot rod" came about in the 1950's, referring
to any customized car, or "set of wheels." Hey,
man, got any "wheels" tonight, I wanna take my
chick to the drive-in?" "Wheels", of course,
did not just refer to those four tires but the
car as a whole.
1950's
Chevy, a cool set of wheels, a customized
hotrod, man
"Fins" or "tailfins"
referred, in the '60's to other than the parts
of a fish: they were the latest fad in
groovy-looking cars." You could tamper uder the
hood of your car to make it go faster; this was
called "a souped-up" car and could also be a
"hotrod."
A long time ago someone might express
pleasure or excitement at an invitation
by saying, "Why, I'd be tickled pink".
How about "So's your old man"? Our terms
were mostly harmless, but for a while,
we seemed fixated on parts of the body.
"Up your nose with a rubber hose" [the '70's
show, "Welcome back, Kotter" starring a young
John Travolta, helped to popularize this one],
"Stick that in your ear," which, not
surprisingly, devolved in the 80's into
something having to do with the sun not
shining. Remember the insult "your mother wears
army boots"?
Rowan and Martin's "Laugh-In" gave us many
expressions - "Sock it to
me", "You bet your sweet bippie." "Hey, little
girl; wanna' buy a box of
cookies?"
The influence of television
on coining new words and phrases was
phenomenal. So were the movies. Perhaps
"sucking face" [kissing] did not originate with
Jane Fonda's "son's" remark to the elderly
senile character of Henry Fonda "On Golden
Pond', but it certainly boosted the popularity
of the phrase. In that same movie, Katharine
Hepburn affectionately referred to Fonda, her
husband, as "you old poop." On television,
Jackie Gleason told Alice, "one of these days,
pow, right to the moon" but, later, making up,
"baby, you're the greatest." Looks like
Muhammad Ali cannot take credit for "the
greatest."
Robert Redford in "The Sting,"
which took place in the 30's, used to say,
"Everything's Jake," meaning
everything's OK.
What goes around, comes around. In the '50's,
something really swell or neat might
have been called "cool." When it was really,
really,
cool, it was "hot." Then it was "outta'
sight!" Now it is back to "kewl." Rad,
man, rad.
The word "boss" has certainly made the
rounds. We know who the boss is....
Bruce Springsteen, of course. But as a
verb, it means to order someone around.
Today we might call a person a "control
freak"; in the 60's, he was merely
"bossy". But in the early 60's
"boss" was an adjective. It meant
cool.... or maybe hot.
The adjectives "hip," meaning
"in," preceded the hippies. They were so far
in, they were out - far out!
In the mid 60's, our parents and
teachers were "square" - they just
didn't get it. Charles H. Brower, one of
our elders, was so upset at the
mal-appropriation of the word "square"
that he wrote an essay about it, and put
it on a 45 RPM:
"Square! Another of the good old words
has gone the way of love, and modesty
and patriotism. Something to be
snickered over, or outright laughed at.
Why, it used to be that there was no
higher compliment you could pay a man
that to call him a square shooter. The
ad man's promise of a "square deal" once
was as binding as an oath on the Bible.
But today, a square is a guy who
volunteers when he doesn't have to. He's
a guy who gets his kicks from trying to
do a job better than anyone else. He's a
boob who gets so lost in his work he has
to be reminded to go home."
"The Square"
became a big hit.
We had a lot of words for people who we
did not like. Today we might refer to
them as dweebs or geeks. Back in the
60's, we might refer to
them as a dork, a dufus, or a spaz (a
derivative of spastic).
Things were real groovy in the 60's,
and
it showed in our music. The Young
Rascals were "Groovin' on a Sunday
Afternoon." We had a "Groovy Kind of
Love" from the Mindbenders. The Duke of
Earl, Gene Chandler, sang, "Well, it's a
groovy situation, and a friendly
combination; that we should meet, on a
night like this." The song was actually
called, "That Girl," but everyone knew
it as "Groovy Situation." Somebody asked
why the newlyweds bought a box of
corduroy condoms. Because they wanted a
groovy kind of love, that's why.
I could dig that. In fact, the Friends
of Distinction went nuts diggin' it: "I
can dig it; he can dig it; she can dig
it; we can dig it; they can dig it; you
can dig it. Can you dig it?"
Things were also mellow in the mid-60's.
But by 1966, they must have turned sour.
Donovan noted so with a song called
"Mellow Yellow."
Being "bent" meant being
drunk back in the 60's. The phrases "on a
bender" probably preceded the '50's and '60's,
while "chugging" and "chug-a-lugging" were
used in the '70's, and still today, often
referring to swallowing ridiculously huge
amounts of beer or, worse, hard liquor, in a
dare situation or a freshman rite. Not a good
idea, then or now.
In college, we created
harmless terms to describe what were
sometimes not-so-harmless
characterizations. If you were just mildly
upset, you were "bent out of shape." But
someone who was a "pretzel case" had a
part of his anatomy twisted in an
unusual and awkward position.
In the 70's, we also used the term "out
to lunch" to describe someone who was
hopelessly lost in this world. It may have
originated in "Along Comes Mary," by
the Association: "When we met I was sure
out to lunch; now my empty cup tastes as
sweet as the punch."
In the late 60's and early 70's, we were
"into" things... bags mostly: "Hey man,
what are you into? What's your bag?" But
some people had negative karma; they
gave off bad vibes. They were really,
really, reeeeally far out!
In the 70's we talked about "doing your
own thing."
Remember the song called, "Lay a Little
lovin' on Me," by Robin McNamara in
1970? ("Honey, doggone it; I'm depending
on it; so lay a little lovin' on me!")
Those words were derived from the term,
"Lay it on me." Today we might simply
say, "So, tell me...."
