Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon
The cult TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which follows a California cheerleader's crusade against the undead, has spawned websites and posting boards, novels, comics and, in the academy, Buffy Studies. This volume, a glossary of the show's distinctive dialect ("Buffyspeak"), is a strange marriage of a fan guide and a linguistics textbook. Referencing the original 1992 film as well as the TV show, the almost 75 novels and novelizations based on the character, the official and unofficial web posting boards and other media associated with the "Buffyverse," the monograph comprises an affectionate but technical paean to American slang and youth culture in addition to its 150-page glossary. As a study of actuation (the origins of new words), lexical gaps (concepts without names), loose idioms, new syntactic patterns and ephemeral language in all things Buffy, the book may be slow-going for the average fan, but the glossary itself offers entertaining browsing for diehard and casual watchers of the show. "The micro-history of the word Buffy is a veritable saga," Adams writes with relish. Indeed, the glossary includes nearly 40 variations on the name: Buffyatrics (older fans of the show), Buffinator (Buffy herself or one who criticizes Buffy) and Franken-Buffy (monster in the guise of Buffy), to name just a few. Readers can also delight in a breakdown of Buffy's distinctive and amusing use of suffixes ("mathiness," "lunchable"), and its celebration of the prefix uber- ("ubernerd," "uberachiever"). Each exhaustive glossary entry includes parts of speech, etymology, definitions and illustrative quotations from magazine articles, posting boards and countless episodes (writer, date and speaker cited). Ultimately, the book is for a very niche audience of Slayer-obsessed linguists-other readers may be baffled by this blend of academia and pop-culture mania.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.