I posted an item a few weeks back about a play written & performed by three of my GCSE (16+) students when preparing for their final practical assessments. Two of the girls were English Asians & the third was white English. The play concerned issues of cultural conflict, which it dealt with sensitivity & with conviction &, deservedly, the girls did well with the piece.
But for me the particular focus of interest was the vocabulary used by the two Indian girls. Drawing on their experience of their relatives in Southall – an area of West London densely populated by Asian families – they used a number of words & constructions with which I was entirely unfamiliar. Subsequent research has revealed broad sources for some of the usages, but others appeared to be exclusive to the English Indian community.
I’m still trying to source a number of the words used & if the research produces interesting data I shall post my findings. Over the next few days, I shall be working on a piece on the more broadly used vocabulary that the play drew on & I’ll publish that in the next few days.
In the meantime, let me share with you a selection of neologisms that came my way via a mass-circulated email. Clearly some of these neologisms have been devised by bored clerks pooling resources on the office intranet. Others, however, have the whiff of invention spurred by necessity about them & we should be alert to their insinuation into contemporary euphemistic usage.
Hasbian, noun
A former lesbian now turned heterosexual. Also known as a wasbian.
SINK SCUM, acronym
Single, Independent, No Kids: the Self-Centered Urban Male.
Slackademic, noun
A perpetual student who prefers the safety and comfort of academic life over the trials and tribulations of the real world.
Body Nazi, noun
Extreme workout & weightlifter obsessive who regards his unmusclebound peers as mere drones in the great hive.
Chainsaw Consultant, noun
A consultant brought in from outside the firm to make utterly ruthless
& cold-blooded decisions that will leave management with clean
hands.
Cube Farm, noun
An office consisting entirely of identical cubicles.
Ideas Hamsters, noun
Employees with a morbid ability to generate ideas 24/7.
Mouse Potato, noun
One who survives on a diet of pizza, warm coke & the Internet round the clock.
Squirt the Bird, verb
To transmit a signal to a satellite.
Starter Marriage, noun
A 6-to-12-month marriage favoured by helium-brained film & pop
stars, which, when it sunders, leaves no lasting traces in the form of
progeny or property.
Stress Puppy, noun
One who thrives on constant levels of stress that would fry most people’s wires in 30 minutes.
Swiped Out, adjective
A debit or credit card that has been exhausted by excessive massaging of the magnetic strip.
Chips and Salsa, noun
Foodstuffs as symbols for, respectively, hardware & software.
Flight Risk, noun
The guy with the sly smile in your department who's believed to be about to hit the road for greater things.
Percussive Maintenance, noun
Hitting delicate electronic equipment with a weighted object, or simply
the flattened or bunched hand, so as to make it work.
Uninstalled, adjective
No more "We're going to have to let you go". Just a key stroke & you're uninstalled.
