Pelecanos: the words, the rhythms, the slang

I’m slowly catching up on the back catalogue of George Pelecanos, who has written about 20 crime fiction novels (and also wrote for The Wire). Recently I read Hell to Pay (2002), which contains several items of linguistic or metalinguistic interest.

The book is one of a handful by Pelecanos that centre on private detectives Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the first black, the second white, the two ex-cops.

Terry Quinn goes looking for information from sex workers. He bums a cigarette as a way into conversation, but being a non-smoker he has nothing to light it with. Then he encounters Stella, a ‘pale’ girl ‘maybe knocking on the door of seventeen’:

She sat down without invitation. He handed her the cigarette.

‘You got a light?’

‘Sorry.’

‘You need a new rap,’ she said, rooting through her shoulder bag for a match. Finding a book, she struck a flame and put fire to the cigarette. ‘The one you got is lame.’

‘You think so?’

‘You be hittin’ those girls up for a smoke, you don’t ask ’em for a light, you don’t even have a match your own self?’

Quinn took in the girl’s words, the rhythms, the dropping of the g’s, the slang. Like that of most white girls selling it on the street, her speech was an affectation, a strange in-and-out blend of Southern cracker and city black girl.

‘Pretty stupid, huh?’

Strong Language: The return of the ***king

It’s over a year since I blogged about Strong Language. Time to recap.

For the uninitiated, Strong Language is a group blog about swearing – the linguistics and culture of taboo language – set up by James Harbeck and me in 2014. It boasts a great team of writers comprising linguists, lexicographers, historians, editors, and other word adepts.

There are swears in this post, so bail out now if they bother you.

Douglas Coupland’s Generation X lexicon

A quarter-century after publication seemed a good time to revisit Douglas Coupland’s self-consciously zeitgeisty novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It remains a rewarding read, inventive and humorous, with a sincerity unspoiled by its often sardonic views.

A salient feature of the book is an ingenious, comical, cultural glossary supplementing the text as it unfolds. For example: Ultra short term nostalgia (unhyphenated in the book) is ‘homesickness for the extremely recent past: God, things seemed so much better in the world last week.’ This had special resonance after the UK’s Brexit vote last month, as did Historical Overdosing:

To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

(The symptoms for Historical Underdosing are the same.)

Some of the near-100 such entries, like McJob – the first in the book – have become established in broader usage. The OED cites Generation X in its entry for McJob, but credits a Washington Post headline from 1986 as the first use.

It’s worth comparing the two glosses: where the OED is appropriately disinterested and concise, Coupland adds wry sociological insight:

Slangs of New York

Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York (2002) has a special feature on the DVD called ‘Five Points Vocabulary’. Five Points is a reference to the Manhattan district where the film is set, and the vocabulary is a glossary of slang from that era (1840s–60s) and place.

It looks like this:

The glossary is spread over eight such pages, so rather than add images, I’ve compiled the text below. Fair warning: it’s slang, and therefore not politically correct.

The problem with stigmatising slang and dialect in schools

I have an article in the Guardian this week in response to yet another school cracking down on students’ use of slang, regional dialect, and informal language. It’s in the Opinion section and is titled There’s nowt wrong with dialects, nothing broke ass about slang.

(Pretend there’s a hyphen in broke-ass.) Here’s an excerpt:

Standard English is a prestige dialect of huge social value. It’s important that students learn it. But the common belief that nonstandard means substandard is not just false but damaging, because it fosters prejudice and hostility. Young people can be taught formal English, and understand its great cultural utility, without being led to believe there’s something inferior or shameful about other varieties. . . .

People feel strongly about correctness in language, but this strength of feeling isn’t always matched by knowledge and tolerance. And because children are sensitive to how they’re perceived, stigmatising their everyday speech can be harmful. By educating them about linguistic diversity instead of proscribing it, we can empower students and deter misguided pedantry.

I’ve been reading the Guardian for as long as I can remember, so I’m glad to finally write something for it. (That split infinitive is a bonus.) The comments section is proving lively, as you’d expect, and I’m joining in here and there. Your thoughts are welcome at either location.

Update:

John E. McIntyre follows up at the Baltimore Sun, where he elaborates on ‘why schoolteachers’ policing of language is so misguided’.

English Dialect Dictionary Online

Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) is a monumental work by any standard. Published in six volumes from 1898–1905, with detailed entries across 4505 double-columned pages, it’s all the more impressive given that its author was largely self-taught and could not read until his mid-teens. (He described himself as ‘an idle man all my life’.)

After studying philology in Germany, Wright began his pioneering work in English dialectology, aiming in the EDD to include ‘the complete vocabulary of dialect words’ in use since 1700. The Oxford Companion to the English Language says ‘nothing of comparable breadth or depth of dialect scholarship has been published in Britain since’.

The EDD is available in various formats at the Internet Archive, but those hefty PDFs can be unwieldy. The good news – great news, for word lovers – is that the book has finally been digitised and is now free and ready to use ‘by all private people, researchers, students and amateurs’. Just accept the terms of use – respect the EDD Online’s special copyright – and away you go.

New slang and old prescriptions

At Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I review a list of ‘words you’re using wrong’ from – unusually for this sort of thing – a linguist.

Appraising Pinker’s prescriptions shows that Stephen Pinker has good advice on foreign plurals and some confusable pairs of words. But on other items his guidance seems unduly strict. For example:

The article insists that begs the question ‘does not mean raises the question’. But outside of philosophical contexts, it nearly always does – whether you like it or not. And it says literally ‘does not mean figuratively’ – but people seldom if ever use it that way: the disputed use is when literally intensifies something that may be figurative.

The article says fulsome ‘does not mean full or copious’ – but it can. It says refute ‘does not mean to allege to be false’ – but this is a preference, not an accurate description of how refute is used. Disinterested, we’re told, ‘means unbiased and does not mean uninterested’, but in fact the word commonly has both meanings – and despite claims of ambiguity, these multiple senses don’t generally interfere with clear communication.

Read the rest for further analysis and my conclusions and recommendations.

*

In today’s post at Macmillan, Your new favourite slang rebuts the knee-jerk reaction against slang and other new informal usages, advising tolerance and patience with people’s language.

It also looks at what new words and phrases people (including me) have been adding to their everyday speech:

I haven’t added bae or fleek to my active vocabulary, and have no immediate plans to, but I have added other new usages. I find hangry (and the related noun hanger) a handy jocular word to describe the feeling of irritation due to hunger. Other relatively new additions to my idiolect include because X and throw shade – though on the occasions I use these I do so chiefly online, where they’re more familiar to people.

Curious about what new usages other people have adopted, especially in speech, I asked on Twitter and got lots of interesting replies . . .

You can click through to read them and offer your own suggestions. Older posts can be browsed in my Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.