- I'm Nicole.
- And I'm Ben.
- And we're linguists.
And today we're gonna tell you
about some things you might not have known
about how language lives.
When it comes to the casual
and playful language we call slang,
words can get popular really quickly
among certain groups and can disappear just as quickly.
Slang is often a kind of in-group marker.
So if some slang term gets too popular too quickly
outside of that in-group,
that can spell the end of its usefulness.
- So with youth slang, for instance,
if the olds start using it, then you know,
it's no longer youth slang.
- Let's take a look at house slang can bubble up,
disappear, and sometimes even come back.
- Nicole, I have a pop quiz for you.
Let's imagine that you could time travel
and you could go back to the year 1699.
And let's say you could go
to the streets of London and hear people talking.
Let's say you also wanted to insult someone's intelligence.
Which of these words could you not use
as an insult at the time?
Booberkin, clodpate,
dulpickle, nigmenog,
or jobbernoll?
- If I'm thinking about the etymology,
then like nigmenog, there's like nog,
which might be like noggin, like brain.
Maybe the one that's not is jobbernoll.
- Well, I'm sorry.
This is actually a trick question.
All five of these wacky words could be used
at the time in 1699 to refer to a dimwitted person,
a blockhead, a numbskull.
And we know this because in that year of 1699
there was a dictionary published
and it's one of the first ever slang dictionaries
for English.
This was a dictionary of cant,
which is the special secret language
used by thieves and pick pockets
and other lowlife characters.
Maybe they were making fun of each other,
maybe they were making fun of the marks,
you know, whose pocket they were gonna pick.
- Maybe we should revive some of those words.
I'd love to call somebody a dulpickle or a jobbernoll.
- You know, I bet those thieves in London weren't too happy
that somebody came along and made a dictionary
with all of their secret language in it.
- Yeah, cause then they had to come up
with a whole new set of words for insulting people.
- Right, so from the earliest recorded slang in English
one thing we see is that these words
can have a really short shelf life
just from too many people knowing about it.
- The whole process of slang becoming popular
and then immediately passe gets accelerated
when you can spread new language around really quickly.
So if you're on social media,
you might see a lot of slang flashes in the pan.
- You remember back in, let's say late 2011, early 2012,
do you remember YOLO?
- Oh yeah.
That acronym for You Only Live Once,
which I think we have Drake to think for that,
in his song, "The Motto".
♪ You only live once, that's the motto ♪
♪ YOLO ♪
- You know, I wrote something about YOLO
in the summer of 2012
and I remember it was already getting played out
and it was just, you know, months after the song came out.
But then I really knew that it was over for YOLO
when I heard that Katie Couric
on her new talk show was doing a segment called
"What's your YOLO?"
where you were supposed to come on
and talk about things you wanna do before you die.
- My YOLO would really surprise you.
- Yeah, that was an actual clip from the segment.
So when that happens, you know that YOLO is over.
That was really the death nail for it.
- Katie Couric on her talk show
is not exactly the epitome of cool, [laughs]
but YOLO did have a good run
before it became way too cringe.
Now that process can happen even faster.
Let's look at cheugy,.
- Uh, do we have to?
- It's a good case study of how slang gets played
out these days.
Cheugy kind of came out of nowhere.
A young woman named Gabby Rasson
claims that she invented it in 2013,
but we don't see it in urban dictionary until 2018.
People still didn't really notice it
until an April 2021 piece by Taylor Lorenz
in the New York Times where she writes all about cheugy.
- Talk about over exposure,
a piece in the New York Times.
I think that could really kill a new slang term.
- And that's pretty much what happened.
Lorenz's piece ushered in the cheugification
of cheugy itself.
Cheugy was a way for Gen Zers
to talk about how millennials were off trend.
But once millennials like Taylor Lorenz herself
were using it,
then it was already cheugy itself.
- The word cheugy is now itself actually cheugy.
Got it.
- A couple of years after the heyday of YOLO
came on fleek.
- Yeah, on fleek.
That's an interesting one because much like cheugy,
we actually know who came up with it.
I mean usually with new slang terms
we can't really pin down who coined it,
but in this case we can say that.
- Yeah, a 17 year old from Chicago named Kayla Newman,
using the handle Peaches Monroee
posted a video of herself on Vine in June 2014.
- Eyebrows on fleek, da [bleeps]
- RIP Vine.
I loved those short little videos.
They were awesome.
- In the Vine, Kayla described her eyebrows
as on fleek before going out to a party
and basically meaning that
they were perfectly done or flawless.
Kayla's perfect eyebrows made such an impression
that soon celebrities like Ariana Grande
were posting their own on fleek vines.
Even Kim Kardashian got in on the action
and eventually it made its way to brands like IHOP,
started using on fleek.
- Brands, why do they have to ruin everything?
- Yeah and it's not the first or last time
that a young black woman came up
with a linguistic innovation
that everybody else latched on to.
- There are cases where a slang term can just keep going
and have the same kind of playful and irreverent air to it.
Think about booze.
- Sometimes I do.
[laughs]
- Well, the word booze goes back to 16th century or so
and we find it in glossaries of criminal jargon.
There's a book from the 1530s
that actually defines it as alcohol or drink.
And it could also be a verb meaning to drink.
And it came from this older Dutch word, poison,
meaning to drink to excess.
So here we are five centuries later
and we're still using that word booze
in pretty much the same way.
- Another pretty sturdy slang word is cool.
And that one's been hanging on for almost a century.
- Yeah, so the word cool has lots of different meanings,
not just about temperature.
So you could call a person cool, calm, and collected,
for instance.
Starting in the thirties and especially the forties,
cool developed this new sense
and that meant first-rate, excellent.
- Yeah, I think of cool as a jazzy word,
like the Miles Davis album "Birth of the Cool".
- Not surprisingly, jazz musicians
have played a big role in the popularization
of the word cool.
Lester Young, Prez Young.
In the early 1940, he loved using that word cool.
His fellow musicians just picked up on that.
We start seeing it in print in 1948, actually.
The New Yorker.
- And then of course the teeny boppers
got to it in the 1950s.
- Right. Cool starts showing up
on lists of teen slang in 1952,
then before you know it,
it's in songs and movies and all sorts of things.
- Jeepers! This is cool!
Real cool!
- Was there backlash against cool after that?
- Yeah, there was some backlash.
The word cool wasn't so cool in the sixties.
You'd call things far out and groovy
and that sort of thing.
Cool kind of recedes a little bit,
but then it comes right back in the 1970s
and it actually goes along
with the whole kind of fifties nostalgia.
You think about "Happy Days" and "Grease"
and that sort of thing.
Since then though, cool has stayed pretty cool.
There's a linguist named Donna Jo Napoli
who says it's held on because of its underspecified nature.
That means it can adapt to lots of different contexts.
- Yeah and adaptability is key for words to survive.
It doesn't seem like cool is cooling off anytime soon.
But this is another interesting point
about who's licensed to use which slang words.
The nuances of meaning and what they say about the speaker
are also always evolving.
- And we've seen just from the words
that we've talked about,
whether it's the dulpickles of 1699,
or slang terms that spread on social media
in the 21st century,
who's using these words
when it's considered acceptable or cool to use these words?
Depends on a lot of different social factors.
And whether these words stay in the language or not,
it just depends on what's cool and what's not.
- [Man] Cool.
- Yeah, I mean we've talked about a lot of words,
old and new.
We hope that you've learned something too, and-
- We've got lots more words to talk about.
So thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.
[invigorating tone]