Don't ask, but now "bust a nut" can mean "to make a U-turn."
By Ani Mazmanian, LALA reporter
Where do the words that college students use on a daily basis come from? I mean everyday slang words, the same ones that we wouldn't expect to hear from our grandparents or English-speaking foreigners. Most of the time, the answer is unexpected. The words turn out to be much older than our grandparents. In 16th-century England, for example, the word "mooch" could mean to hoard things, not far from the 19th-century sense of sponging or scrounging. I thought that was our "mooch."
In 1989, UCLA Linguistics Professor Pamela Munro and her seminar students came up with the task of documenting words on campus, many of which had not made it into standard American English dictionaries. Her students have since put together five UCLA Slang books, the latest one in 2005. What each book represents is a unique form of speech. Though the words may be traced to other eras, slang really does separate people into groups and subgroups on campus. There are many words that international students would not understand, at least upon arrival. In fact, Munro writes in her introduction, the most common definition of slang is language that identifies a person as a member of a certain group.
Munro explains that some international students might want to join the class in order to improve their English; however, they usually find it very hard to contribute words. Nevertheless, the compilers keep in mind that international students and other non-fluent speakers might show interest in the book. For this reason, each offensive word is noted with a warning for those readers to be cautious when using such language.
The demographic that Munro's undergraduate students have focused on is themselves. Munro makes clear that the purpose of the project is not to represent Southern California or Los Angeles slang. Since UCLA draws people from all parts of the world, "UCLA slang represents a sort of amalgam of all these different sources of slang." A great number of Spanish words are included in UCLA Slang 5. In previous years, Yiddish, Russian, and Japanese words have appeared. A number of words commonly associated with Northern California, such as "hella" ("really, very, or a lot of" as in, "there are hella people in line"), also appear.
Of course, given modern communications, it's often hard to put a geographical label on a word, or to distinguish between which words students brought onto campus and which they learned after arriving. And, some words are so new that there's no information about their origin.
Savvy?
The greatest single source for slang, Munro says, is probably African American English. "Bust a move" is derived from Black English "to make a move," from the 1980s according to Lighter's 1994 dictionary. In UCLA Slang the word "beat" gets a first definition as "ugly" (adjective) but also means "to have sex" (intransitive verb).
Words rejected as slang include jargon, which is specific to members of a given occupation or those who participate in a sport or other activity. The language of Instant Messaging is usually not included, since the book concentrates on spoken slang, and IM and "texting" abbreviations are not part of casual speech. An exception is "LOL" (laughing out loud), which was included in UCLA Slang 5 because people use the initials in conversation. The student editors also avoid words that are "slang" within a family or group of friends but not in general use on campus.
Nearly all of the included words come from the past, but the amount of change they've undergone varies a lot. The sense of "boonies" as "a place that is a long distance from the main cultural center" is traced back to the US Marine Corps and Navy (1956). There's nothing new about "savvy?", meaning "understand, got it?", but the dictionary attributes its wide use on campus to the release of the film Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003. "Jack shit" was used mostly by Southern college students starting in the 1960s. The variations "jack crap" and "jack squat" evidently have been used more on this campus in the past three years.
Some words change a lot more. In the early part of the 20th century, a "chickenhead" referred to a stupid girl. Since 2001, UCLA Slang has defined it delicately as "a promiscuous female" or "a female that hangs around or performs favors for a male, even though he is not nice to her." The phrase "bust a nut" was originally defined "to ejaculate"; don't ask, but now it means to make a U-turn. Other words like "sick" and "gnarley" have taken on two contrary meanings, as slang words can.
Munro explains how the meanings of "gnarley" can combine: "it has a good meaning, it has a gross meaning, and it has an exciting meaning. Those are three really quite different concepts. And, in a sense, the exciting meaning is kind of a merger of the two. Like an amusement park ride, that makes you feel like you're going to throw up or something is gross, but at the same time it's wonderful. So, you package them together and maybe get 'excited.'"
Because slang words take on new meanings and new ones are adopted, compiling these words is an ongoing task. The longevity of the project, however, is part of its appeal. In the meantime, Munro will be teaching the slang seminar again the fall, and if enough students are interested in continuing for another quarter, UCLA Slang 6 will be published in June 2009.