Newsgroup: it.fan.tv.buffy
Titolo: Slayer Slang

http://www.buffy.nu/article.php3?id_article=8068
Buffy & Co. Changed How Teens Talk. A Lot.
From Pbs.org - 2005-01-22nd
Sez Who?
Slayer Slang
Television heroine Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, has been an unlikely source
of language change. In his book, Slayer Slang, A Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Lexicon, Michael Adams tells how this unconventional teen challenged
linguistic taboos and introduced new words and phrases in nearly every show.
Slayer, witch, werewolf, vampire, commando, contractor, vengeance demon,
supernatural force incarnate - in other words, they are all average kids,
in average relationships, battling the forces of adolescent evil,
personified, in Sunnydale at least, by vampires, demons, and monsters. They
are also particularly adept speakers of American English, especially of
slang. After her self-sacrifice, Buffy is buried under a headstone that
reads “She Saved the World. A Lot.” What does it mean for American English
that the world’s protector, its thoroughly contemporary American savior, is
a rapid-fire quipster, a hip teen who knows the language of her place and
time, but who, by virtue of her role as Slayer, however hesitantly
accepted, is necessarily an unacknowledged hero, an essentially normal
person whose destiny casts her out of the mainstream, whose status
paradoxically erases her status in the conventional world? Buffy needs
slang, as a means of shrugging off millennial expectations, as a weapon,
and as an expression of personality officially denied her by her role: in a
sense, she IS slang, as are those who associate with her.
Slayer slang may be here to stay, not only as slang, but as standard
American English
Buffy has introduced new slang terms and phrases in nearly every episode,
many of them formed in the usual ways, some of them at the crest of new
formative tendencies. The show incorporates familiar slang, too; the
familiar and newly coined slayer slang together compose a particularly
vivid snapshot of current American teen slang. Undoubtedly, most slayer
slang will prove ephemeral, not that there’s anything wrong with that;
indeed, short-lived terms and tendencies are often significant in their
time and can influence the course of American English, though once they
disappear, we may not see the connections between them and what follows
them. Some items of slayer slang, however, steadily intrude on everyday
speech and may be here to stay, not only as slang, but as standard American
English.
Does anyone feel like we’ve been Keyser Sozed ?
Besides contributing items to the slang lexicon, slayer slang intensifies
current formative practices in slang: it glories in them, certainly, but it
also constitutes, by exaggerating them, a critique of those practices. For
instance, the writers acknowledge that slang increasingly trades on
references to popular culture by shifting proper names into other parts of
speech, both verbs and adjectives. Thus Xander asks in Puppet Show (5 May
1997), “Does anyone feel like we’ve been Keyser Sozed?” after the character
in The Usual Suspects when he means ‘tricked, manipulated’. Afraid that
Halloween will get out of hand, Xander remarks in Halloween (27 October
1997), “Halloween quiet? I figured it would have been a big ole vamp
Scareapolooza,” from the alternative rock festival Lollapalooza; similarly
he argues in The Wish (8 December 1998), “Look, you wanna do Guiltapalooza,
fine, but I’m done with that.”
On much:
When we say sentences like Walk much? we shorten Do you walk much?; Do you
is understood by both speaker and auditor. At first glance, Whedon’s
sentences seem well-behaved, but they aren’t really: Do you excuse much is
not what he has in mind in Excuse much; if anything is understood, it must
be a pronoun, yet it isn’t the me we usually assume, but you, as in the
very colloquial declaration Excuse you! And what is the result? Excuse
(you) much, which makes a lot less immediate sense than Walk much?, not
least because the question is “...rude or anything?” rather than the phrase
involving much.
When we hear a word or sentence pattern, it undergoes scrutiny, whether
we’re conscious of it or not: we judge its acceptability according to a
certain set of standards; the standards vary according to the vocabulary
against which the newer item is measured. In the case of much, collocations
with verbs in brief questions have long been acceptable in colloquial
English; collocations with adjectives have not. At first, those saying or
listening to ADJECTIVE + much constructions approved of them as slang
because such sentences do not pass our acceptability judgments: in other
words, acceptability as slang depends on a certain degree of
unacceptability with regard to a standard. After a while, though, ADJECTIVE
+ much had been repeated often enough that it lost at least some of its
original unacceptability. Without offense to the perpetually hip Gary
Trudeau, when sentences like “Off message much?” appeared in Doonesbury (7
October 1999), the once rebellious much had begun to conform, to enter the
consciousness, perhaps even the verbal repertoire, of the statusful. And it
doesn’t help the street cred of ADJECTIVE + much that NOUN + much is
clearly so much more effectively rebellious against traditional English
grammar and conventional meanings of much, of course, but also against the
increasingly acceptable ADJECTIVE + much; comparatively, after those more
radical collocations began to appear, Pathetic much? just doesn’t seem so
tough. Even NOUN + much faces gradual acceptability: Stephanie Manzella
doesn’t seem to have missed a beat when asking her boyfriend, Tim Redding,
who was having trouble parking, “Curb much?” While NOUN + much consigns
ADJECTIVE + much to acceptability, frequent repetition of both ADJECTIVE
and NOUN + much gradually may push the latter into colloquial English usage
as well.
Slang is a type of linguistic jaywalking: you can stand at the crosswalk
and wait for the light to change, but that would be boring, as well as
slow, so we’d rather not. Adverbial much jaywalks when it modifies
adjectives; when it modifies nouns, it’s about as extreme as language gets.
Excerpt reprinted from Slayer Slang, A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon by
Michael Adams. Copyright © 2003 Oxford University Press.
Jolan Tru
-- 
Filippo "Hytok" Simone - L'oracolo sampdoriano di Sunnydale
La Casa degli Elfi - 
http://www.freewebtown.com/lacasadeglielfi/
Enclave del Dominio - S.N.S. Despiser - 
http://ildominio.altervista.org/
Commissione Voyager - 
http://www.voyageritalia.com/

Sul gioco di ruolo c'e' una nutrita appendice che spiega 
il "buffyspeach", come parlare in maniera "buffyana"
solo che non me lo sono mai spulciato anche perche' molto si e' perso 
nell'edizione italiana, quindi...
-- 
Fabio Cavallin
aka Dottor Divago
«Nulla puo' togliere ad un uomo,
la sua capacità di sognare ed immaginare»
mailto:
drdi...@supereva.it
Inviato da 
www.mynewsgate.net

nell'edizione italiana, quindi...
Altrarecensione:
http://www.pbs.org/speak/words/sezwho/buffy/
Buffy & Co. Changed How
Teens Talk. A Lot.
Television heroine Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, has been an unlikely source
of language change. In his book, Slayer Slang, A Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Lexicon, Michael Adams tells how this unconventional teen challenged
linguistic taboos and introduced new words and phrases in nearly every show.
Slayer, witch, werewolf, vampire, commando, contractor, vengeance demon,
supernatural force incarnate – in other words, they are all average kids,
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On much:
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least because the question is “…rude or anything?” rather than the phrase
involving much.
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Sez Who? Index
Suggested Reading/Additional Resources
    * Adams, Michael. Slayer Slang, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon.
Oxford University Press, 2003.
    * Dalzell,Tom. Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang. Springfield,
Md: Merriam-Webster Inc.,1996.
    * Eble, Connie C. Slang & Sociability: In-group Languages among College
Students. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Michael Adams teaches at North Carolina State University. He is the author
of Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (Oxford University
Press, 2003) and co-author of How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction
to the English Language (Longman, 2005). From 2000 to 2005, he was editor
of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America. In
2006, he will become editor of American Speech.
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