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Slang plays with words.
It's part of what makes us rebellious.
It's part of what makes us rebellious.
It's also part of what makes it very fun.
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So we can say I'm going to go spend time with the 'fam'
so I can hang out with the 'rents.'
Or we can go get some 'za' because maybe it's 'delish.'
Or read zines, but maybe we think zines are 'ridic.'
Or you can go get a 'mani' or a 'pedi'
because you're taking good care of your 'bod.'
Linguists call these clippings.
And we can shorten words by clipping something off the front
as in 'rents' from parents.
Or we can clip off the end of a word
- 'fam' from family.
I'm very interested in a set of very slang-y clippings right now
where young people are clipping off the end and then adding an 's.'
So 'whatever' becomes 'whatevs,'
'totally' becomes 'totes,'
'probably' becomes 'probs,'
and then we have 'haps,' which may come from 'happenings'
so there's an 's' on it,
and the expression 'what's the haps?'
Now, while many of these slang words are new
the process of clipping is not new.
Some of you may have been thinking that when I used the word 'bod'
and you may have been thinking 'that's been around for a while,'
which it has - it's been around since at least the 1940's.
And, in fact, there are clippings that are no longer slang-y or colloquial to us
they've become standard.
So if you think about clippings like 'phone' from telephone,
or 'gym' from gymnasium,
'exam' from examination,
a 'mic,' a 'limo.'
All of these are clippings
but most of them now don't feel like slang.
In fact, I can't remember the last time I said I was going to go buy 'gasoline,'
as opposed to getting 'gas.'
So it's important to remember when you hear these clippings that young people are using in slang
that it's not that we aren't using clippings in the language all the time.
And some of these slang-y clippings will stick,
many of them will not.
But some of them will just become unnoticed in the language
the same way that we now have the 'flu'
and the 'phone'
and the 'deli.'
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