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Lost for words? Try some gibberish

Any parent who can get the following words right should deserve a medal for transcending the generation gap.

Let us start with the easy ones: what is “vanilla”? Remember, it is not an ice-cream. Or how about “mouldies”? Clue: it has nothing remotely to do with “moulding” but might have a bearing on age. What does “bo ok” stand for when it is not meant to be a “book”? What’s a “za”? Or who is a “yoot”? And what is “jamming”?

Well, I’m not going to try your patience any more, but those of you who may have drawn a blank (as I’m sure most would have) please do not be too hard on yourselves. For that is the whole idea: they are not meant to be understood. These words have been coined by teenagers precisely to shut out stuffy, old-fashioned adults from snooping on their conversation.

Forget stuffy and old-fashioned. Even young parents, who know a thing or two about modern slang, find themselves scratching their heads when they hear young Tommy yelling on the phone: “Mouldies are vanilla.” Or when little Stephanie shouts out “laters, butters” before sailing out of the front door.

But, now, one teenager has spilled the beans and published a book, The A-Z of Teen Talk, containing her generation’s secret linguistic weapon against their parents. Predictably, 13-year-old Lucy van Amerongen’s book has been a huge success with parents lapping it up — relieved that ultimately they have the “key” to their children’s gobbledegook.

However, lest they think they have cracked the code and can now relax so that next time Tommy says he is going “jamming” they would know what he is up to, Lucy has a word of caution: the teen-lingo is constantly evolving and “more and more phrases come up everyday.” So, even as parents devour Lucy’s A-Z, Tommy is learning new words to trump them.

Reportedly, the idea for the book came when Lucy, a student of Cheltenham College (Cheltenham, by the way, is famous for its annual literary festival), was on holiday with her parents and two sisters. Her father, a man from the communicative world of television, found himself struggling to understand as Lucy and her sisters chatted away in their secret lingo. Her mother joined in the parental revolt against their daughters’ impossible-to-understand teen talk.

“It was gibberish. That’s when Lucy said she should write a dictionary so we could understand them. It’s all a bit fun, but I bet it will shed a bit of light on the strange mumbo-jumbo of teenagers’ talk for a lot of other parents,” Victor van Amerongen told The Daily Telegraph.

Lucy had instant offers from several publishers and the one she finally opted for –Sussex-based Ravette — even gave her a £1,000 advance. Most of the 5,000 copies of the first print-run are reported to have been sold, and an updated version is planned.

Lucy hopes the book will “clear up a lot of confusion” for poor, old parents — or “mouldies” as her generation calls them. Yes, “mouldies,” abbreviation for “mouldy oldies,” are parents; “vanilla” is boring, dull, especially when referring to someone’s taste in clothes (“Look at her checkers, vanilla, or what?”); “book” is an adjective to describe something really cool (cool as in fashionable, not as in hot and cool); “za,” an abbreviation of pizza; “yoot” is child/children; and “laters, butters,” goodbye, see you.

There are a whole lot of similar other gibberish-sounding words that teenagers deploy to keep off curious parents. Here is a random checklist: “antwacky” (unstylish, unfashionable etc); “flat-roofin” (overworked, stressed); “jamming” (hanging around); “nang” (cool, excellent, brilliant); “gash” (unpleasant, ugly); and “igry” (embarrassed: “Stop doing that, you’re making me igry). For more, pick up a copy of Lucy’s A-Z before it gets outdated.

Talking about books, a novel that was rejected by more than a dozen literary agents and publishers has won one of Britain’s most coveted literary prizes, the Costa Book Awards, previously known as the Whitbread Prize.

Catherine O’Flynn’s mystery novel What Was Lost, built around the goings-on in a shopping centre, has been adjudged the best First Novel award and is now in the race for the £25,000 Book of the Year prize. Judges described it as an “extraordinary tale, blending humour and pathos in a cleverly constructed and absorbing mystery.”

Ms O’Flynn, 37, joining a distinguished band of writers who had their first works rejected, urged other aspiring writers not to give up in the face of rejections. She hoped her case would give people hope. “I hope it does give people hope. It’s very hard to get published, and it’s hard if you go in there with this burning ambition. I didn’t have that, I was protected by my natural pessimism.”

Ms Flynn said she was inspired to write when working at a shopping centre in Birmingham, which is believed to be the setting for the novel. “It wasn’t until I started writing here at Merry Hill [shopping centre] that I found the words just leaking out of me at night. And I’m not sure whether it was this place that just inspired me or whether it was something that would have happened anyway.”

After being rejected by a host of publishers, Ms O’Flynn’s novel was, eventually, accepted by Tindal Street Press, an independent publishing house devoted to discovering new talent. “What Was Lost doesn’t fit neatly into the standard pigeonhole that publishers like to put their books into,” its publishing director, Alan Mahar, told The Times, describing it as an “unusual book … saying something quite new … about our obsession with shopping but it is also a mystery story of great emotion.”

As the old cliché goes, you can’t keep a good man (in this case, a talented woman) down for too long…

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