词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Campus Slang

Broadcast on "Coast to Coast": December 19, 2002

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- slang on campus.

RS: Our friend Dianne Gray, an English teacher in Moscow, has a student who would like to know some of the slang used by students at American colleges and universities. Dianne writes, "I have not been back to the U.S. in nearly 5 years; I thought perhaps someone could give us an update about this."

AA: That someone is Pam Munro. She's a linguistics¹ professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. She just completed a survey asking 300 students for current slang words used at UCLA.

MUNRO: "The first one is the word 'hella,' h-e-l-l-a. It means something like 'very.'"

AA: "Or 'hell of a.'"

MUNRO: "But notice that when in standard language you say 'hell of a,' the thing that follows it is a noun or maybe an adjective plus a noun, so like 'he's a hell of a good guy.' But hella is used with an adjective, so like 'he's hella good.'"

AA: "There's a song by No Doubt, by the group No Doubt with Gwen Stefani called 'Hella Good' --

MUNRO: "Sure.

AA: "that's been getting a lot of play."

MUSIC: "Hella Good"/No Doubt

RS: Second on the list of top slang words at UCLA is "tight" -- not as in "close fitting," but meaning "good."

MUNRO: "This is a word that is kind of amusing to me, because when you ask people for examples, they'll say things like, 'man, that shirt is tight.' It's a good example of why parents don't always understand what students mean when they're using slang. And the third one is the word 'chill.'"

AA: "Used in the sense of if someone is agitated² or .. "

MUNRO: "It has two meanings. It can mean relax in the two senses that relax can have. So it can mean don't be so agitated or it can mean sit around doing nothing. 'Sick' is the number 4 word. 'Sick' is another positive word. 'That girl drives a sick car.' 'Your new hairdo is sick.'"

RS: "Go on."

AA: "So number 5."

MUNRO: "Number 5 is 'cool.'"

AA: "The perennial³ ... "

MUNRO: "Right. I've been collecting slang from UCLA students since 1983 and working intensively with groups of students making little dictionaries since 1988 and all the students that I talk to about it always believe that 'cool' is absolutely current even though of course it's been around for a long time.' So the next one you might not have heard. The next one is 'a grip.'"

RS: "Yes, I have."

MUNRO: "So you've got a child in the right age range."

RS: "Yes."

AA: "As in 'get a grip.'"

MUNRO: "No, no. Rosanne, what does it mean?"

RS: "That's what I thought!"

MUNRO: "Ha-ha-ha-ha. 'A grip' means like a lot. Here's an example. "Man, for Thanksgiving I ate a grip of food. I was so full I couldn't stand up for hours."

AA: "I have never heard that."

MUNRO: "We've been getting that at UCLA for I guess about six years, I would think."

RS: "And number 7?"

MUNRO: "I have many, many variants⁴ of this but I'm counting it as one. These are expressions that mean 'for sure.' So, the first one -- not in any particular order -- is 'fo sheezy,' then we have 'for shezy,' then we have 'forsheez,' then we have 'fo shizzle.'"

AA: "Sounds like no one is quite sure how to spell that word, huh?"

MUNRO: "They're not sure how to spell it, but notice that there are some different pronunciations too, so ... "

RS: "What was number 8?"

MUNRO: "Well, I have a tie for 8 between 'dope' which is another positive word. You know that one?"

AA: "It can mean illegal drugs; in this case it means good." MUNRO: "No, it means good. I'll give you an example here: 'That movie was dope. It's worth seeing again.'"

RS: "So 8B?"

MUNRO: "This is a word that people spell in a number of different ways -- and, depending on how they speak English, might pronounce in different ways -- the word 'wack' or 'whack⁵' or 'whacked⁶' are the three spellings I have. This is a negative term. Do you know this one?"

RS: "'Whacked out,' you mean like crazy?

AA: "Crazy?"

MUNRO: "No, that's not the sense in which they mean it. The definitions that they give are bad, boring, stupid, unfair, uncool, nerdy, crazy, strange, weird⁷, lame⁸, pointless, messed up and pathetic. So you saw some of those are actually slang definitions, but it gives you the idea. We had two number 8's, so we're going to skip to 10. We actually had a tie for 10. One of the two is 'sweet' -- 'dude, that new computer is sweet.'"

RS: "What's tied with 'sweet'?"

MUNRO: "'Shady.' Not trustworthy, unreliable, wrong, undependable, suspicious, questionable⁹, deceitful, not nice, or evil."

AA: "That's kind of standard English, though, isn't it."

MUNRO: "I agree with you that 'shady' has a somewhat similar meaning in standard English, but I agree with these students that this is not -- that most of these examples are not things that you would hear in standard English. So, 'That guy just smacked¹⁰ his girlfriend. That's shady to do her so dirty like that.'"

RS: Pam Munro is a linguistics professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. We鈥檝e posted the UCLA campus slang list on the Wordmaster Web site at voanews.com/wordmaster.

AA: And, if you鈥檝e got questions about American English, you can write to us at [email protected]. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

---

1. hella (97 responses)
2. tight / tite / tyte (87)
3. chill / chil (34)
4. sick / sic (33)
5. cool (20)
6. a grip (19)
7. fo sheezy / for shezy / forsheez / fo shizzle / fo shizzy / for shizzle / fer shizzle / fa shigidy / fo sho (16)
8-9 (tie). dope (15)
wack / whack / whacked (15)
10-11 (tie). shady (12) sweet (12)

1 linguistics   

n.语言学

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• Linguistics is a scientific study of the property of language.语言学是指对语言的性质所作的系统研究。

2 agitated   

adj.被鼓动的，不安的

参考例句：

• His answers were all mixed up,so agitated was he.他是那样心神不定，回答全乱了。
• She was agitated because her train was an hour late.她乘坐的火车晚点一个小时，她十分焦虑。

3 perennial   

adj.终年的；长久的

参考例句：

• I wonder at her perennial youthfulness.我对她青春常驻感到惊讶。
• There's a perennial shortage of teachers with science qualifications.有理科教学资格的老师一直都很短缺。

4 variants   

n.变体( variant的名词复数 )；变种；变型；（词等的）变体

参考例句：

• Those variants will be preserved in the'struggle for existence". 这些变异将在“生存竞争”中被保留下来。 来自辞典例句
• Like organisms, viruses have variants, generally called strains. 与其他生物一样，病毒也有变种，一般称之为株系。 来自辞典例句

5 whack   

v.敲击，重打，瓜分；n.重击，重打，尝试，一份

参考例句：

• After years of dieting,Carol's metabolism was completely out of whack.经过数年的节食，卡罗尔的新陈代谢完全紊乱了。
• He gave me a whack on the back to wake me up.他为把我弄醒，在我背上猛拍一下。

6 whacked   

a.精疲力尽的

参考例句：

• She whacked him with her handbag. 她用手提包狠狠地打他。
• He whacked me on the back and I held both his arms. 他用力拍拍我的背，我抱住他的双臂。

7 weird   

adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的

参考例句：

• From his weird behaviour,he seems a bit of an oddity.从他不寻常的行为看来，他好像有点怪。
• His weird clothes really gas me.他的怪衣裳简直笑死人。

8 lame   

adj.跛的，(辩解、论据等)无说服力的

参考例句：

• The lame man needs a stick when he walks.那跛脚男子走路时需借助拐棍。
• I don't believe his story.It'sounds a bit lame.我不信他讲的那一套。他的话听起来有些靠不住。

9 questionable   

adj.可疑的，有问题的

参考例句：

• There are still a few questionable points in the case.这个案件还有几个疑点。
• Your argument is based on a set of questionable assumptions.你的论证建立在一套有问题的假设上。

10 smacked   

拍，打，掴( smack的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He smacked his lips but did not utter a word. 他吧嗒两下嘴，一声也不言语。
• She smacked a child's bottom. 她打孩子的屁股。