Put the word out With ever-evolving usage of slang, groups often speak their own language
When 22-yearold Elizabeth Bergman said a certain hairstyle was “goals” on a social media post recently, her father reacted with utter confusion.
“My dad was like, is this grammatically correct?” said the Ohio State University senior from Grandview Heights. “He’s just like, did you mean to do that? Was
that a typo?”
Nope, she was just trying to say that it looked good.
Fleek, high-key, stan — don’t know these words? Well, maybe you’re not supposed to.
After all, that’s sort of what makes slang, slang.
“(It’s) when one group of people knows what it means but another person doesn’t,” said Ohio State senior Sarah Chopko, from Howland Center in northeast Ohio. “Like, we know what it means, but our parents don’t.”
One example Chopko said she and her peers use is saying “lit” to describe something that is going to be great or fun. (No, Mom, this is not to be confused with the old-school, slangy use of “lit,” which describes a state of drunkenness.)
Another is “high-key,” which basically means “really” or “to a great
degree,” and is sister slang of “low-key,” meaning “to a small extent,” or “subtle.” Duh.
Technically, there are two approaches for deeming something slang, said Michael Adams, professor of English language at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, whose scholarly works include writings on slang and jargon.
One is what Adams calls the “pointy-headed” rule. “That says it’s slang if it’s a low-status synonym for a standard English word or phrase,” he said.
The other rule?
“It’s slang if you say it’s slang,” Adams said.
But the idea that a particular group knows and uses certain words to define boundaries — to speak in ways meant only for that group — is a large part of what slang is all about, he said.
“When people listen to slang, especially adult people who don’t know what’s going on, they think, ‘Well, that’s crazy language. We don’t need that language. Why would you say that?’” Adams said. “But the truth is, if one of the things those words does is define group boundaries, then standard English isn’t going to do that job for you.”
Some suggested that those boundaries may have been crossed earlier this month when U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-jefferson Township) referenced Ohio’s “My Life My Quit” program, a service to help teens quit smoking and vaping, on Twitter, telling teens “vaping isn’t fleek or fire.”
Many on social media mocked the tweet and suggested Beatty was out of her depth with the language she used or was trying to act younger than she is.
“It’s kinda cringe-y,” Swathi Sarathy, 20 and also an Ohio State senior, said of the congresswoman’s tweet.
“Fleek,” according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, means “smooth” or “admirable,” or “fashionable” or “top-quality.” The same source defines “fire” as “excellent” or “first-rate.”
But few were discussing whether Beatty was using the terms correctly, Adams pointed out.
“It was just the outright wrongness of her using the word ‘fleek’,” he said.
Beatty, unbothered by those who poked fun at the tweet, said she was simply “speaking to teenagers in their language.”
“This is what they ask for. They ask for us to come to their level and to understand them,” Beatty told The Dispatch.
Messaging aside, in the end, the tweet got the visibility — and awareness for the “My Life My Quit” initiative — that Beatty hoped for. As of this week, the tweet had garnered about 26,000 likes, more than 12,000 retweets and numerous news articles and blog posts.
Some slang can begin as “a language of resistance” among minority groups who might feel marginalized in society, Adams said, particularly LGBTQ or African American groups. Think “tea,” for example — and we’re not talking about Earl Grey.
Used in phrases like “spill the tea,” meaning to dish out gossip, tea is a word with roots among LGBTQ people, Adams said. It is traced particularly to black drag culture.
It’s difficult to say what makes certain slang stick — when slang stays local within a group or becomes universal, Adams said.
One of the country's oldest slang phrases, OK, has been traced back to a Boston newspaper that used the letters to mean everything was correct, as an abbreviation of the silly-spelled “oll korrect.”
For Ohio State senior Shawn Harkins, from Pittsburgh, slang words usually have a domino effect among his friend group: “It’s like once one of my friends start using it, everyone starts using it.”
Like using “mood,” he said, a word nominated for the American Dialect Society’s slang or informal word of the year in 2018, meaning “strong emotion of agreement.”
He and other young adults think social media seems to accelerate its spread.
“You see it on social media, and then your friends start saying it in real life,” Chopko said. “And then you start picking it up.”