Yo, today's slang is da bomb

Staten Island Advance
Sunday, November 16, 2003

"Yo, look at that rod! You done did you, kid!" Does the above phrase mean:

(a) "What a great piece of fishing equipment! You bought a nice one!"
(b) "Wow, what a nice car. You've done really well for yourself."
(c)  Something unprintable in a family newspaper.

If you picked a or c -- especially if you picked c -- it's best you keep reading this article.

While there are hundreds of different types of slang, youth slang can be the hardest to decipher. With all the "yo" this and "kid" that, it can make it seem as though you need a passport to go to the grocery store.

The bilingual among us, however, say that it's not that hard to get under the current teen lingo. All you need is some common sense, creativity and a long memory.

"There's a lot of slang because we don't forget the words from before," says Giovanni Rosa, a 17-year-old from Rosebank. "It's like if the government were to add letters to the alphabet, we'd still use the other 26."

A part-time paper boy and honor student, Rosa switches between slang and conventional English like a translator. He says that while most slang starts in the streets, it's spread through pop culture, especially music.

"My rhyming skills/got you climbing hills," sings Eminem on the eponymous track of his "Infinite" album. The word "skills" has been around slang for a long time and is still in use, mostly to mean what it actually does mean -- a set of talents.

"I got skills," however, definitely does not equal "You sure have some nifty chess skills, Mr. Rogers."

Attitude and delivery are as important to slang as the actual words. "Do you" is very popular right now, but without the right intonation and context, you could end up only "doing you" a disservice. The phrase usually means "take care of yourself," and is often used casually in greeting; a common response to "Whazzup?" is "Yo, nuttin', I'm just doing me."

That can mean anything from, "I'm doing well at work/school," to "Life is good."

It's also used to mean "stand up for what you believe in." If someone throws down an insult ("disses"), "do you" can be used as an imperative, as words of encouragement.

This kind of fluidity keeps the slang serviceable, and makes for terminology that just refuses to go away, such as "jiggy," a word immortalized by rapper Will Smith in his infamous "Getting Jiggy With It."

"Jiggy" still works because it fills a need; it encapsulates a kind of confidence and coolness for which there just isn't another term.

"People always need new words," says George Jochnowitz, professor emeritus of linguistics at the College of Staten Island. "I think that's why we're born not knowing how to speak."

Jochnowitz says that slang is used to ease communication between groups of people and builds community, like a secret handshake or password. Know the slang, and you're in.

This kind of inside terminology applies in more ways than most people realize; computer slang ("mouse," "RAM," "boot") has become a commonly accepted language because the society of people who use computers is so large. If the world were largely made up of teens, most people would be "doing" themselves.

In youth slang, a lot of the adapting is done by cutting the fat from our everyday phrases. "N'aimean" is common slang for "Do you know what I mean?" and tends to roll off the tongue with a lot less effort, and is hence used as often as most of the population now uses "like."

A laid-back, lazy cadence is expected when speaking youth slang, so much so that some of the language has been squashed into nearly unrecognizable forms. The condensing is more often than not based on sound rather than spelling. "I're" is a further contraction of the previously contracted "a'ight," which means "all right;" the form is now used as a way of saying, "okay!"

And like any type of slang, youth slang has its own insider vernacular that only the true experts use, the same way only computer geeks can recite C+ programming.

The "izzle" vocabulary, for instance. As in, "fo' schizzle," a phrase often heard from rapper Snoop Dogg's mouth.

"That's a whole other language," Rosa says. "You don't even want to go there."