For as long as I can remember, I have been intensely drawn to language as expressed through slang. That constant, often playful evolution of words and phrases by individuals and groups that can twist or entirely change both the word itself as well as the meaning. This is actually one of the many things that Amily and I have in common, although she brings with her the addition of an almost academic love for how society as a whole changes language as time passes.
While we are all surrounded by the tumult of language growing and changing, participation in that process definitely varies by individual. As I get older I find that my own contributions to language soup increases, but I have had the fortune of being surrounded by an extremely high number of people that have driven the creation of slang within both my small and large social circles.
The first but not most influential force for me was my father. Although largely absent from my life including most of my childhood, the time we did have was filled with a rainbow of completely nonsensical words like “udlyudskudbudly”. While the context of its use has long been lost to time the word itself lives on.
Without a doubt the greatest influence in my life was the neighborhood kids I grew up with. They were collectively absolute powerhouses of redefining the meaning of words, twisting words into variations of their former selves, or just completely inventing new words completely. This collection of tweens and teens were responsible for many of the nicknames we still have today, and shaped my own view of words as malleable playthings to do with as I please.
I think what is so fascinating is the depth and breadth of our playing with words. For me the absolute peak of this was the evolution of “sloppy”. But first a little context. Fantasy (sword and sorcery) games, books, and movies were hugely influential in my neighborhood when I was growing up. We were the right age at the right time to be deeply immersed in the Golden Age of fantasy. D&D was, undeniably, the king of that mountain.
It was through our long gaming sessions that a lot of our most prolific verbal wizardry occurred. While I may attribute this incorrectly because he was the most prolific USER of the terms, I believe the evolution of “sloppy” started with Charlie. He was a very excitable, intense D&D player. Think of how extreme sports fans express their excitement when their team is winning… That is how Charlie played Dungeons and Dragons. It was from these gaming sessions that the journey of “sloppy” began.
At a very basic level, “sloppy” was used to describe the aftermath of a successful combat. It indicated not only that you had defeated the monsters that you had engaged with, but that you had obliterated them into a pulpy mess of gore. It was hyperbolic to say the least, but kids are kids and talking big is what they do.
From there the evolution was swift. “Sloppy” became “shloppy”, a slurring S added to the pronunciation to exaggerate the word and allow you to drag out it over several seconds for effect. The word quickly broadened to mean anything amazing and worth celebration. If it was something fantastic, it was definitely “shloppy”! Perhaps you yourself were just above average, so we might greet you with “Hey Shloppy”! If you were the active bringer of something “shloppy” it meant you were the “shlopper”.
At some point “shloppy” was such a baseline concept that in order to indicate something worthy of extra note we had to introduce “shlopp-o”! From there you can simply tack things on as needed. It might be “schlopp-tastic” or “shlopp-o-riffic”. If you brought it extra hard you might be the “absolute shlopperer”.
Amusingly, 35 years later we still use this as described above. It is a permanent part of the lexicon for the neighborhood kids that remain in contact with each other. But more importantly for me, it ingrained in me not only a deep love for word butchery, but established a heightened proclivity to participate in this creation process that only intensified when pre-Internet dial-up bulletin boards came into my life, to be quickly replaced by the Internet itself.
I could spend hours pondering the impact that Internet meme culture has had on my own relationship with words and phraseology. The internet is cultures layered on cultures of in-groups inside of in-groups. It is the blender in which language goes to die and be reborn. With that said I will touch on my favorites.
At the low end of the spectrum you have your basic abbreviations. I am old and cranky enough to actually remember, pre-Internet, when I first encountered “LOL”, “ROFL”, and “ROFLMAO”. Even in the days of dial-up modems and bulletin board chats the meme machine was hard at work morphing and changing something as fundamentally understandable as “WTF” into a more playfully non-sensical “WTFbbq”. I have little doubt that the first time I saw “ROFLsausce” and “ROFLcoptor” I was captivated.
As you journey from there you may enter the wonderful world of bad / careless typing mistakes being intentionally exaggerated, like “PLZ” being written as “PLX”, which then evolves into “PLOX”. These take on an extra layer of joyful absurdity when you move them from the realm of text and actually pronounce them out loud. For anyone following the current GME stock saga, I can admit that the word “hold” will now likely forever be pronounced as “HODL” and I definitely like the “stonk”.
My absolutely favorite two-phase evolution of all time is the excited and excessive use of “!!!!!!!” being expressed as a careless “!!!1!!111!11!” which then becomes the mocking “!!!one!!!eleven!”. There is such a biting, sardonic wit to this that I find it nothing short of genius.
There is another layer in the game of words that results not from the creation of something new, but rather the revisiting of the old and abandoned. This is actually the basis for my Pedantic Ponderings posts, as words can fall so out of fashion and use that they can become new again even when used precisely in the capacity of their original meaning. They obtain a level of absurdity through obscurity.
Word soup is not for everyone, but for me it occupies a very important place in the mechanisms of silly that I think are the foundation of maintaining joy in ones daily life. The world is all too willing to serve up a buffet of stress, disappointment and dour outlooks on life, and I find that keeping a counterbalance of lighthearted playfulness is critical to the balancing act of emotional sanity. I encourage everyone to find their dumb and absolutely embrace it, nurture it, and protect it. Without that joyful silliness in your life you risk becoming nothing more than another Udlyudskudbudly.