Stacy has some rather … interesting examples of contemporary British slang at her blog, most of them not the sort of thing you want your kids saying. But damned funny in an imaginative way (and liable to make you blow whatever you are eating or drinking out of your nose, so be warned).
Language — slang, in particular, as “the people’s language” — is interesting. To what degree does language influence thinking, as Orwell suggested in 1984?. If a slang term comes along that is funny, catchy — and carries a particular spin on a topic, does that spin influence how that topic is thought of? Or is it that the spin resonates as true, and therefore the term becomes catchy and funny? Or (since that’s annoyingly the way the world tends to work) is it a bit of both?
I’m belaboring this, but I find such questions about language fascinating. Which is why I would have linked to the articles floating around about post-9/11 teen slang here in the states, but they were ubiquitous and therefore unnecessary.
Hm. I think that checking the survey is a good idea. I live in the Detroit Metropolitan Area, and I see an awfull lot of white ‘boys’ (term used loosely) in SUVs and sport cars saloming their way through the e-way traffic at high speeds…
Way more than I see black drivers acting like that… (unless, of course, I am right down in the city on a weekend… then there are lots of all kinds of people being stupid with their weapons of destruction – known as cars)
‘Course the demographic *could* be different here…
Always a good idea to check methodology. Heck, maybe the windshields of all the SUVs were at an angle to prevent identification of the race of the driver.
But … I’ve a suspicion that if the study had shown speeders were precisely proportional to the racial demographics, or even that, say, blacks were under-represented among speeders, there would be a lot more hue and cry, and the Justice Dept. wouldn’t have blocked the report.