A Glossary for the Nineties: Introduction
[Taken from A Glossary for the Nineties, by David Rowan (Prion Books, 1998), based on the column of that name in The Guardian's Weekend magazine through most of the 1990s. © David Rowan]
INTRODUCTION
AT THE beginning of Reader's Digest every month, you are brashly reminded that It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power. Diligently and dutifully, you memorise such socially necessary words as soporific and atrabilious. And then, when your frequent use of soporific fails to attract admiring glances from bosses and dates, you begin to feel atrabilious. Why is the world so unimpressed by your efforts?
As the ad execs say, marketing is all about finding the sexy angle. And if you want to pitch yourself as a clued-in, nineties type of trendsetter, the Readers Digest is the last place you will turn to learn how to talk. If you really want to be dope and kickin', to be wizzy rather than a wuss, you'll take your terminology from far hipper places. Rap songs, the frontiers of technology, criminals' slang or advertisers' jargon - all contribute to the language we're constantly having to re-learn. And then just as you think you're up to speed, there the language goes and updates itself again.
Ten years ago, even five or three, you might have spilled your lager if someone in a pub had asked you whether you were a sinbad or a sitcom. Now, if your vocabulary is up to date, you know they're making a simple enquiry as to your marital status: whether you have a Single Income, No Boyfriend, and are Absolutely Desperate - or whether you in fact have a Single Income, Two Children and an Oppressive Mortgage. If it had been suggested a couple of years ago that you should bookmark them for a future date, or signal to them that you would not consider downdating, you might have responded with a dwerbish ingorance that would have impressed nobody. Now you ought really to know that you are faced with a choice between taking a phone number, and rejecting them as inadequate to meet your standards.
Still, no need to worry if you're still not fully familiar with all of those phrases: you've come to the right place. This book is designed to help. The language we use is permanently updating itself, under the influence of everything from drink marketing to drug-rehabilitation centres. From skateboarders' slang to politicians' euphemisms, new words and phrases don't stop heading into the public consciousness. And, whether we're adultescents or smug marrieds, we ignore them under peril of losing touch.
The language grows new words from the slang of subcultures, the jargon of specialists, the demands of new technology and new social trends, and from things that newsmakers say. It only took George Bush reading his lips, or the bobbitting of an American whose wife cut him off in his prime, for us all to develop new ways of talking. Many of the new terms do little to enrich the language, and serve only to hide what people want to say - from the euphemisms of business chiefs to the jargon of "experts" who want to keep you in the dark. But many, too, add colour, humour and richness to the dialogues of daily life - and many more are simply very useful.
This book is a sampler of the language as the nineties come to a close. It is not a dictionary of neologisms: there are plenty of those on the market, each with excellent teams of lexicographers to hold each new coinage up to rigorous scrutiny. Nor is it a comprehensive record of new words - a list of all the coinages even of 1998 would extend to a volume far longer than this one, and rather too many of them would be technical and specialist terms you wouldn't find too fascinating. No, this book, pure and simply, is a small and biased selection of a few of the more interesting terms to have emerged in the 1990s to enrich the ever-flowing stream that is the English language.
The words and phrases here have all been recorded in public use: they were used in newspaper and magazine articles, or have been uttered by broadcasters and politicians. Some I overheard in conversations among among bus passengers or executive airline passengers; others emerged in academic journals or billboard advertisements. Then there were the long conversations I had with people who use their own specialist slang and jargon: afternoons down at the South Bank to hang out with skateboarders, or evenings at the gay bars of the West End interviewing patrons about the slang they use; visits to advertising agencies and to teenage magazines. Along the way I picked too many brains to give adequate credit here - needless to say, from the military experts and the police officers to the rap DJs and the anti-vivisection campaigners, many people with a specialist knowledge have been kind and unravelled some of the secrets for us outsiders.
Not all of these terms will last. The language is always moving on, as people vote with their tongues to determine just how they wish to be understood, and new words are often the first to be left behind. But some, already, have become so indispensable to modern life that it is hard to imagine how we coped without them: was there really life before office workers had to hot-desk and newspapers worried about dumbing down? What did we call slackers or policy wonks before we had the words for them?
Most of these terms have appeared in the Guardian's Weekend magazine, and I'm grateful to the editor, Deborah Orr, and to Billy Mann and the team who have nurtured the Glossary column since 1992. Before that my weekly Lingua Franca column let me monitor the slang of dozens of sub-cultures, and I owe a debt to Roger Alton for giving the column space. I'm grateful to the authors of the Sheath File, and to Antoinette Renouf and her team at the University of Liverpool, for the examples of their work quoted here; and I've found it useful to consult Web sites including alt.culture.com and the Hackers' Dictionary. Guardian readers were also a valuable resource, sending in their own examples of new usages, and telling me when they disagreed with my initial translations.
I hope you'll think of this as a phrase book for the language as the millennium approaches. As with most phrase books you take on holiday, you'll no doubt be met only with bemused faces when you start to use it. But I hope you'll at least have some fun preparing yourself for your journey.
INTRODUCTION
AT THE beginning of Reader's Digest every month, you are brashly reminded that It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power. Diligently and dutifully, you memorise such socially necessary words as soporific and atrabilious. And then, when your frequent use of soporific fails to attract admiring glances from bosses and dates, you begin to feel atrabilious. Why is the world so unimpressed by your efforts?
As the ad execs say, marketing is all about finding the sexy angle. And if you want to pitch yourself as a clued-in, nineties type of trendsetter, the Readers Digest is the last place you will turn to learn how to talk. If you really want to be dope and kickin', to be wizzy rather than a wuss, you'll take your terminology from far hipper places. Rap songs, the frontiers of technology, criminals' slang or advertisers' jargon - all contribute to the language we're constantly having to re-learn. And then just as you think you're up to speed, there the language goes and updates itself again.
Ten years ago, even five or three, you might have spilled your lager if someone in a pub had asked you whether you were a sinbad or a sitcom. Now, if your vocabulary is up to date, you know they're making a simple enquiry as to your marital status: whether you have a Single Income, No Boyfriend, and are Absolutely Desperate - or whether you in fact have a Single Income, Two Children and an Oppressive Mortgage. If it had been suggested a couple of years ago that you should bookmark them for a future date, or signal to them that you would not consider downdating, you might have responded with a dwerbish ingorance that would have impressed nobody. Now you ought really to know that you are faced with a choice between taking a phone number, and rejecting them as inadequate to meet your standards.
Still, no need to worry if you're still not fully familiar with all of those phrases: you've come to the right place. This book is designed to help. The language we use is permanently updating itself, under the influence of everything from drink marketing to drug-rehabilitation centres. From skateboarders' slang to politicians' euphemisms, new words and phrases don't stop heading into the public consciousness. And, whether we're adultescents or smug marrieds, we ignore them under peril of losing touch.
The language grows new words from the slang of subcultures, the jargon of specialists, the demands of new technology and new social trends, and from things that newsmakers say. It only took George Bush reading his lips, or the bobbitting of an American whose wife cut him off in his prime, for us all to develop new ways of talking. Many of the new terms do little to enrich the language, and serve only to hide what people want to say - from the euphemisms of business chiefs to the jargon of "experts" who want to keep you in the dark. But many, too, add colour, humour and richness to the dialogues of daily life - and many more are simply very useful.
This book is a sampler of the language as the nineties come to a close. It is not a dictionary of neologisms: there are plenty of those on the market, each with excellent teams of lexicographers to hold each new coinage up to rigorous scrutiny. Nor is it a comprehensive record of new words - a list of all the coinages even of 1998 would extend to a volume far longer than this one, and rather too many of them would be technical and specialist terms you wouldn't find too fascinating. No, this book, pure and simply, is a small and biased selection of a few of the more interesting terms to have emerged in the 1990s to enrich the ever-flowing stream that is the English language.
The words and phrases here have all been recorded in public use: they were used in newspaper and magazine articles, or have been uttered by broadcasters and politicians. Some I overheard in conversations among among bus passengers or executive airline passengers; others emerged in academic journals or billboard advertisements. Then there were the long conversations I had with people who use their own specialist slang and jargon: afternoons down at the South Bank to hang out with skateboarders, or evenings at the gay bars of the West End interviewing patrons about the slang they use; visits to advertising agencies and to teenage magazines. Along the way I picked too many brains to give adequate credit here - needless to say, from the military experts and the police officers to the rap DJs and the anti-vivisection campaigners, many people with a specialist knowledge have been kind and unravelled some of the secrets for us outsiders.
Not all of these terms will last. The language is always moving on, as people vote with their tongues to determine just how they wish to be understood, and new words are often the first to be left behind. But some, already, have become so indispensable to modern life that it is hard to imagine how we coped without them: was there really life before office workers had to hot-desk and newspapers worried about dumbing down? What did we call slackers or policy wonks before we had the words for them?
Most of these terms have appeared in the Guardian's Weekend magazine, and I'm grateful to the editor, Deborah Orr, and to Billy Mann and the team who have nurtured the Glossary column since 1992. Before that my weekly Lingua Franca column let me monitor the slang of dozens of sub-cultures, and I owe a debt to Roger Alton for giving the column space. I'm grateful to the authors of the Sheath File, and to Antoinette Renouf and her team at the University of Liverpool, for the examples of their work quoted here; and I've found it useful to consult Web sites including alt.culture.com and the Hackers' Dictionary. Guardian readers were also a valuable resource, sending in their own examples of new usages, and telling me when they disagreed with my initial translations.
I hope you'll think of this as a phrase book for the language as the millennium approaches. As with most phrase books you take on holiday, you'll no doubt be met only with bemused faces when you start to use it. But I hope you'll at least have some fun preparing yourself for your journey.
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