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Lingo that connects
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Words that define a generation also work as bonding factor
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Photo: G.P. Sampath Kumar
Funky jargon The mantra to connect is to use colloquial speech
You hear it on television, from the mouths of celebrities, teenyboppers, at metro bistros and at your own home. You read it in newspapers, you see it in messages and e-mails. It’s that all-pervasive word, the word that defines this generation - like.
Equally dividing fun, emo, social gum and attempts at channeling your inner jock, the generation-defining words are swiped and swapped in informal riffs.
Online and offline conversations are generously sprinkled with these words. Rakesh, a guy who spouts as many of these words as possible - even when impossible- says: “As soon as you open your mouth the word ‘like’ comes out spontaneously. It’s like so natural with us.”
Fitting in
“It is our generation word,” says Ashok G., a degree second year student who fortunately believes something worthwhile had also happened before 1990’s. “Rest of the words like yeah, hi, hey, cool, guys follow,” he gushes.
“Basically they connect us to each other,” says Ram, a cool guy with a feel for the hip words and adds: “They allow us to fit into the large crowd. You are in a communicative hole unless you use these words. I didn’t know I had to use these words to fit in but over a period of time these words felt cool.”
“Yeah, they are the social glue that binds us,” chips in Ravi, a language enthusiast. “Whenever I chat with strangers on the net and engage in the frivolous,” he says, adding: “Well, these words let me know I belong there. I know they are my age group.”
You could look totally out of whack and sound so 80s if you don’t use these words. “I had to learn things like stuff, hip, hang out, chill out, kind of, gives me creeps,” says Venkat, someone who makes a little nothing of a word sound like little something of contemporary wisdom and zeitgeist.
“The words geeks and nerds float around in all our conversations,” says Deepak, a techie whose feel for language equals his feel for his iPod.
The conversations are spiked with words that have a special resonance with the generation. “In our time, you see was most common,” says B. Vara Lakshmi, a Reader in English and an ELT trainer, adding: “Our teachers would use understood for almost everything.”
What man, what girl, and what boy were quite common in 60s and 70s at school level. “We used to pick up words with colloquial feel in our classrooms, or from films and comics,” she adds. “Now that we have Telugu medium instruction, and every film or comic being dubbed into regional language, we are losing subtlety and spontaneity of English expressions.”
Dapper P.S.R. Murthy is a retired engineer. He observes: “Our teen friends would use what ba for Telugu emitabba. Expressions that have Telugu influence like in you are coming-no or you are going—aa sound funny, if not an outright anathema. Another thing that gets his goat is the frequent use of the word shit. “There are even instances of people losing their jobs for unconsciously using the word in interviews.”
Looks like earlier colloquial words that caught popular imagination were woven around human relations and education system, whereas the existing self-styled ‘in’ words are cropping up around pub culture.
G.B.S.N.P. VARMA
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