A Digital Orange
I've now reached the point in my novel, set in 2050, where I increasingly need future slang. Naturally, I thought at once of Burgess' classic and went over the glossary again, extracting only 'banda' and 'brat'--Russian is a dying language and seems likely to expire without leaving behind much of an influence on others. And of course, since my book can't possibly hope to rival it, it would be foolish to rip it off. It seems to me that slang in 40 years--aside from being filled with terms we can't now possibly imagine--will likely continue to evolve, as it has done for the previous 40, from white teenagers' versions of black teenagers' slang. I've also included some new Chinese terms as well as Mexican-American 'underground' slang. The trick is to imagine how they might mutate in the future.
Here's a partial list of what I've come up with so far, much of which I've already used. Any criticisms or additions would be very welcome:
'migo = dude
ballahs = rich people
bing = shocking surprise
bobble head = cheap hooker
brat = brother or sister
cake = cocaine
candy = ectsasy
canton = house, apartment ('canteen'=kitchen, 'can'=toilet)
chopping = buying or selling drugs
Enriched = modified future English
file = knife
fusk someone up=shoot them
good nuff= half-assed, everyday
Grid = the universal gaming net
haloing = committing a violent crime after gaming
inked = tattooed
jigga = black man
klep = steal
loco = term of endearment
mayo = stupid
minnie = girl
mook, mookie = guy, dude
ninja = blood brother, companion in arms
noms = nomenclatura, wealthy bureaucrats, government 'ballahs'
placa = badge, tattoo
prostitots = little girls
putas = gays
rock = crack
shan zhai = cheap knockoff, TJ (from 'Tijuana')
shido = cool, awesome
shiny = cool
shero = tough woman
shot = passenger seat, best seat
skunk = grass
slappin = casually beating a stranger, usually in groups
soda = cocaine
soldjas = members of terror groups or gangs
spin drive = air-car engine
spinners = air-cars
squad = gang
squaddies = buddies
stoning = kicking or beating a stranger to death in groups
staple gun = assault rifle
'Stims = Selective Synaptic Re-uptake Exhibitors wedded to Dodexedrine, used in gaming
strapped = carrying weapons
surged, surging = beautified by cosmetic surgery
swagga = personal scent
swoop, swoop me up = a ride in an air-car
tangs, bandas = teenaged gangs
tinta = black or dark-skinned girl
torta = lesbian
tweak, tweaking = crank, speed
Uno = unit of global currency, worth about 140% of an old dollar
wango = slob
wankstas = wannabee gangsters
wombrat = baby born naturally, not in a tank
--
- Kierkegaard's blog
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References -
"That comment is so toast"
"That guy is totally toast"
Source:
--http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/toast/
This place is my vacation.
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)Must-haves (you might already know about):
http://www.urbandictionary.com/
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php
http://www.phrases.org.uk/index.html
http://www.doubletongued.org/
http://www.alphadictionary.com/slang/
http://books.google.com/books?id=l3MKAAAAIAAJ
http://timwoods.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=97/
Might also help:
http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/NathanBailey-CantingDictionary/transcription.html
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Grose-VulgarTongue/http://www.erikandanna.com/Humor/bullshit_generator.htm
http://mariodelgado.com/cockney-dictionary/
Just to chip in on the 'meta' discussion about Future Slang, Efficacies & Overuses, I think artificial slang only works when it becomes meaningful in the story. Good fictional slang is more than just a propos shorthand (or novelty word-salad as in way too many sci-fi books), it encapsulates a coherent attitude or a politics, like Sarah Palin dropping -g's as a verbal wink to the Midwest, or like Orwell teasing out the impersonal brutality of mid-century totalitarian attitudes with anodyne expressions like "doublethink." Thieves' cant was designed to elude police spies, a type of "aesopian language," whereas the equally obscure Cockney rhyming slang reveals a good-humored cynicism about the unchanging features of London urban life.
Made-up words, in other words, have to be "in character."
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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)Thanks! Some of these totally blow mine out the water. I'll release a revised list as soon as I wade through them all.
I generally agree with you--with the exception of a few brilliant classics (Clockwork Orange, again to belabor the obvious) where it was artificially imposed. And of course, the story has to be good, as you say. That was why Neuromancer and Count Zero and Snowcrash worked so well. Sadly, I can't aspire to such exalted company, so I have to do my homework.
I was sort of happy to be participating in a thread where Sarah Palin wasn't actually mentioned. No one's dropped g's lately with more of a twang than your guy, you know, so that was a particularly feeble stretch. You must be in love. Or lust anyway. I know it can be embarrassing ;)
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| parent )under "may be useful." Looks like a ton of unattested (but interesting) modern London slang, not reliable at all but may spark ideas.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )I should've checked, I guess I just assumed she'd been brought up already. Isn't there some kind of standing rule against more than three Sarahless comments?
Sorry, it's just that the election's still top of mind for me (to borrow some of that grating MBA jargon).
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )Icebox=cool
Heard it in an old The Young One's episode.
~At times like these I am reminded of the immortal words of Socrates when he said...."I drank what?"
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)Drop the kids off at the pool=pooping
"Just a sec, I got to go drop the kids off at the pool. Be right back."
__________________
Bat in the cave=visible booger in your nostril
"Blow your nose, you got a bat in the cave."
--~At times like these I am reminded of the immortal words of Socrates when he said...."I drank what?"
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| parent )I'm using Babelfish, too, under the "Xerox principle". In 40 years all digital translation will be called Babelfish, according to that rule. I invented "Babelpus' for digital signing ;)
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| parent )have you been following intellectual property law for the last several years? Based on a straight line extrapolation, it's more likely that you'd do jail time for such a transgression.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )I didn't vote for no lawyer ;)
But yeah, it would be interesting to write a novel set in a future when *all* nouns and verbs were copyrighted.
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| parent )but under the so-called "Digital Millenium Copyright Act" Congress (both parties, enthusiastically) made it a crime to fiddle with anticopying software on your own computer. Software that you bought and own - or thought you owned.
Hank's right - protection of Hollywood and Microsoft has gone far beyond the rational stage, and consumers are being treated as idiotic cash cows. How can it be a criminal act to change something you bought and own in any way you like?
I'd love to see Obama start to use open source software for government recordkeeping. Someone needs to pick up Microsoft and snap it in half over their knee.
If you are thinking of a TV tuner card for your computer, get one now before the "broadcast flag" is implemented.
--Even a dead midget is far from light. - Confucius
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| parent )tireless record on behalf of the MPAA and SPA. Then make a wild guess at how "pro-piracy" the new administration will be. Internet sales will be taxed as soon as the states run out of money.
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| parent )if the company you are buying from has a physical presence in your state (offices or warehouses), you're taxed the standard sales tax on mail order purchases.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )which is why Amazon didn't buy Borders. But taxing the buyer anyway is already the law in a few places (like where I live)--it just isn't enforced because it contradicts the Federal extension of tax-free status. I'm predicting that will end within the next 4 years.
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| parent )but unless you want to run structural deficits until the currency collapses, the money has to come from somewhere. This source doesn't strike me as particularly egregious.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )sure hope you're right and I'm wrong!
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| parent )or about the internet taxes? Or is there something else I'm supposed to be right about? (Don't get your hopes up, my wife and daughter would be happy to fill you in on all the things I'm wrong about).
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )I doubt the dollar will collapse-- the Euro and currencies like the ruble and the Pakistani rupee are going down the tubes way faster. In fact the dollar has strengthened in the past few weeks. The yen mounted a strong run, but today's economic news should end that.
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| parent )Because Obama has absolutely no record so far of co-opting people who disagree with him and removing them to positions of zero capacity to affect his preferred legislation.
I really hope some vestige of Abraham Lincoln is looking down and just savoring.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )The prospect of a second Civil War?
It may come as a shock to you, but Lincoln didn't actually like black people much. His only real relationships with any were with his servants, and he wasn't notably generous with them. While there is absolutely no question that he was the steadfast liberator of black slaves (except, of course in the State of Maryland, which was exempted from freeing its until, in a few cases, the turn of the century) at a time when almost any other politician would have compromised his beliefs, he wrote and spoke privately of his disdain for them as individuals.
This has no bearing on my point, which is that Biden (and Obama, to the extent he has voted on anything) has supported nearly every industry initiative against the individual Internet user. Don't believe me--look it up. McCain has been only a bit better. And neither party is going to flinch from taxing Internet sales once state revenues fall through the floor. But by all means, take exception to imagined criticism of your Savior.
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| parent )Obama has been a firm proponent of Net Neutrality and has worked on its behalf.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )and supporting the MPAA attacks on Bit-Torrent ain't quite the same thing. Initially I was only talking about Biden anyway. You're cherry-picking ;)
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| parent )but Obama's the guy with actual Constitutional authority, so it's really worth talking about him more than talking about Biden.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )or at least something I have come up with and use now and again....
crack machine=ATM
ATM machines, use it once, and you are hooked, you always come back for more and it seems you can't live with out it.....just like crack.
Usage: "I have to hit the crack machine before going to the mall."
--~At times like these I am reminded of the immortal words of Socrates when he said...."I drank what?"
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)crack is already called rock, 'tweaking' is already a term for being high on speed, and skunk is a particular kind of weed.
... maybe you're not trying to come up with wholly new slang? I'm commenting coz I'm worried you're not plugged into current drug slang ...
you've got both cake and soda as terms for cocaine. I don't like soda -- what about 'dust'?
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)What I really need is to come up with whole new drugs. A little like the heroin tar-Tylenol PM mix. I am using a lot of Khat as a replacement for coffee.
In the book of course ;)
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| parent )or take new drugs today like 2C-B (aka Nexus) that aren't very popular but likely to become mainstream... depending on how far your story is set in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2C-B
maybe if you're going to invent new drugs make them some kind of combo of existing drugs. e.g. 2C-B is both a psychadelic similar to mushrooms and gives a body high similar to ecstasy.
... other slang that popped to mind:
heroin = the boy
ecstasy = molly
pot = the buddha
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| parent )Thanks! The buddha is a definite go ;)
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| parent )Good one. As in - pot-bellied. Took me a while to get it.
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| parent )how about Valium, Belladona root and a drop of transmission fluid? It isn't any stranger than the stuff people are using nowadays.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )I've tried it. Did nothing for me ;)
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| parent )Double negation is a standard feature of many kriols. "Yo no lo se no" I don't know it, no.
Another standard formation of an Asian-Western kriol is to put the interrogative at the end of the phrase. Where were you? in standard Spanish becomes Dónde estabas? but in an Asian-Spanish bozal kriol becomes Estabas dónde?
So you might want to force out elements of standard kriol grammar into your futurespeak. No morphology of inflection. Overuse the past imperfect, filling in with "start" and "finish" to substitute for more elaborate verb forms.
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)Substitute huecos.
Puta is a female whore, exclusively hetero whore.
I'll work the rest of the list, that stood out.
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)that was a typo. Meant to be 'putos'--which actually really does mean 'gay' in San Antonio. At least according to the online dictionary ;)
But I'm grateful for all help and suggestions. I'm not married to it ;)
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| parent )It can also just mean a stud, "El es muy puto", he's a real stud.
Tell me a bit about the milieu of this kriol you're trying to form. What cultures are colliding, and where?
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| parent )to create a new dialect, though of course that sounds like a great project. For a future work. I tend to side with Chuchundra and Hank myself on this one, though I still think there can be a proper balance. What I'm looking for is a series of 'mot justes', usually in dialogue, for the world of 40 years from now. That's much easier to do with tech terms--for example, microbreweries and microfactories and microwave weapons firms are called the 'Microbiz' and rely on "Bubble Tech". As for cultures--all of the world's. The hero works in the Minority Assistance Department, or MAD.
But finding the perfect word for everything else...much harder ;)
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| parent )- with this kind of stuff, a little goes a long way. I tend to throw away novels that use too much non-standard English. Maybe that's just me, but you're been warned :)
- learn from Burgess, he used an existing language to borrow terms, he didn't use the slang of the day very much. Nothing dates a novel more than "comtemporary" slang from when it was written. So "shan zhai" is good, "prostitots" not so much
- based on the last point, I'd go more for neologisms rather than existing slang terms
But of course these points don't matter nearly as much as how the terms are actually used in the novel, context is everything.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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)I was actually thinking of 'The Prostitots' as the title of a reality HoloTV show ;)
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| parent )want to go all bad ass wit the Grimm's Law thang or vice versa. Just substitute the t's with d's, the p's with f's, the "l's" with "r's" and the "w's" with a kr (or anything else for that matter) and see what you come up with. The hard consonants tend to get dropped over time and the hard to pronounce as well so "Enriched" might morph into "Enrish*" just like today you hear "axed" instead of "asked". It might be easier to say "stapler" than "staple gun".
*although that sounds like something you would hear at the Vietnamese hairdresser :)!
--I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
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)The term "Enriched Standard" was inspired by Chinese in-laws' attempts to speak 'Engrich" ;)
Black slang already follows the trajectory you describe. Constant gaming or internet use, however, has the odd effect of turned 'aksed' back into 'asked' and 'da' back into 'the'.
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| parent )Ok, what about using a gamer's spelling as substitutions for certain sounds. A cool on-line spelling for a name like "cereal" is today "coolified" into "c3r3al". In this case, the "3" is only there to be hip , however, over time the 3 may become a symbol for a specific sound (old or new) which, given the state of future post-apocalyptic gaming worlds these days, could then be spelled with a pre-apocalyptic alphabet! Or something....
--I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
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| parent )Early on I tried writing 'pornography' as 'pr0n' with a zero.
Unfotunately, it looked so lame that I changed it back after 5 minutes ;)
The most extreme example of messin' with Mother English that I've read lately is Will Self's "Book of Dave". And sadly, so far at least, it's stymied me. Maybe I'll call that the 'Chuchundra Effect' ;)
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| parent )Too much odd slang that requires me to puzzle out what it means in context or refer to a glossary just breaks me out of the narrative flow of the prose. A word or two here or there for flavor is OK, but generally I'd avoid using more than that.
It's a lot like writing in dialect. Even if you're really good at it, it can easily get in the way of telling the story. Is the flavor of having a character speak in an authentic brogue worth making your reader go over each line of that character's dialogue five times to puzzle out what's being said?
--Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
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)some of the greatest visionary novels ever written, like '1984' or 'Brave New World', employ it.
Maybe we can agree that it works well when brilliantly done--but fails miserably otherwise.
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| parent )I don't remember all that much future slang in 1984. We do have some Newspeak to contend with, but it's not used all that much and even when it is, Orwell takes some pains in the story to explain what the terms mean.
I remember being pretty annoyed with the slang in Clockwork Orange when I first read it back in high school. Some of the Droogs conversations early on were nearly incomprehensible to me and I would simply skip a lot of stuff rather than sit and puzzle it out.
I'll admit that some of this is my own personal preference. I hate when writers purposefully get in the way of the story with cute writer tricks or interesting prose styles that they want to show off. I wanted to punch Sam Delaney in the face after finishing Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand.
These days, I just don't put up with that stuff. I picked up The Road from the library and took it back the next day after reading just a couple pages. Thanks but no thanks.
--Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
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| parent )past page 3 with mine, then I'll know I've succeeded. ;)
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| parent )The following don't work:
>fusk someone up=shoot them
Too general.
>jigga = black man
Too much like "wigger;" it makes me think of some Jain dude from India wearing baggy pants and talking trash.
>mirch = cool
Close, but it's like "merch," which is a sell-out term.
>mook, mookie = guy, dude
Moke (moc) is better.
>ninja = blood brother, companion in arms
Too general, like above. It's got to be modified or shortened. ninjidoka or something.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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)about mirch, which is why I got rid of it. 'Fusc' is Tex-Mex slang for a gun, tho, and 'jigga' is old black DJ code for the n-word. 'Mookie' also has a long and storied usage history, plus it works in actual dialogue, which some of these terms really don't. Ninja is apparently current gang usage, but I have my reservations--I prefer 'squaddie'.
Thanks for the input!
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| parent )....or so I have heard.
Some people who I heard about when growing up would reference "Commercial Weed" (ie. brick weed) as "merch".
...not that I'd know anything about that, mind you......just.....you know....what I heard....around.....and such.....
--~At times like these I am reminded of the immortal words of Socrates when he said...."I drank what?"
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| parent )for that authentic effect. weed breaks into 2 different groups, indica + sativa.
indica = roughly body high pot
sativa = more of a mental high
maybe that'll come in handy.
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| parent )