Welcome to Slang City
My latest column in the Malaysia Star. There is, of course, a lot more to be written on the subject of slang as spoken in New York City, both currently and historically, but the length of a newspaper column allows for only the lightest touches and I sought to keep an eye on the audience of Malaysian English-speakers to whom all of it might be new.
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It’s a spoiling good time listening to the millions of voices in New York City. Sometimes a little piece of all that talk changes your language.
For example, if you take a ride in a yellow taxicab, you’ll see a metal emblem riveted to the hoods. That medallion shows that the car’s owner has purchased the right to operate on city streets.
The opposite of the licensed taxis are the gypsy cabs. Gypsy is used to describe something that roams ungoverned. Cabs of all kinds are one of the causes of gridlock, coined in 1980. Gridlock means that there’s such a traffic jam that all the vehicles are going nowhere.
Dollar vans are another way people get around the five boroughs of New York City. These are privately owned passenger vans that operate along loose regular routes, just like city-run buses. They used to cost only a dollar, thus the name, but, like everything else, the dollar vans now usually cost more than a dollar.
A borough, by the way, is a political division within a city. Each of the city’s five boroughs in turn has its own named neighbourhoods. Inside the borough of Manhattan, for example, are neighbourhoods like the Lower East Side and Chinatown.
Besides lending the vast lexicon of food items that can be eaten in the vast dim sum halls of Chinatown, the Chinese experience here has left other terms in English.
According to lurid newspaper reports from the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the hatchet was the favourite weapon of assassins working on behalf of the Chinese tongs. The assassins were, of course, called hatchet men, a term that first appeared in New York City and San Francisco.
Now a hatchet man is someone who writes negative things about someone else on behalf of a third person. Consultants who are paid to tell large corporations that they need to fire thousands of people are also called hatchet men.
A term you will still see occasionally is highbinder, which in the early 1800s meant a violent criminal or thug. The word was taken from the name of the High-binders, an Irish gang.
Highbinder was later used to refer to a member of a secret Chinese criminal gang, especially an assassin. By 1890 it referred to a slimy – disreputable or untrustworthy – politician.
This is the life of words: they travel paths of transformation. Like hatchet man, highbinder has become less negative over the years. These days it is mainly an inkhorn term, one used by journalists to show off their thesauruses.
A word that thrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s in New York City but now appears to have completely fallen out of the language is lobbygow.
In a well-known murder trial in 1914, one of the witnesses described a lobbygow as “a pal and a friend willing to do almost anything he is told”. Early police literature describes lobbygows as white men who run errands for the powerful Chinese underworld bosses.
By the 1930s, a lobbygow was a person who would lead tourists on slumming tours of Chinatown. The middle and upper classes could get a first-hand look at how the lower class lived. Lobbygows were believed to be as likely to lead someone to a planned mugging as they were to show them opium dens.
Like language, the city changes. There are no more opium dens and no longer do the tenements – crowded apartment buildings – of the Lower East Side house the heart of the city’s Jewish community.
But we still have the Yiddish term schnook, meaning a sucker, a rube, or a loser, a term which dates to the early 1940s in English. It’s related to shmuck and schmo, which are similar Yiddish-derived terms.
Even further entrenched in English is shtick. Shtick is sometimes used these days to refer to anybody’s standard way of behaving, either to get attention or to get something they want.
As far back as the 1960s it meant a theatre performer’s routine, the thing they do in order to get paid. An actor or anybody with a public persona who has need, on occasion, to haul out their shpiel – synonymous to the German spiel, meaning a long story or rehearsed routine – probably has a shtick.
A typical shpiel is what you hear from a salesman who tries to sell you things. Just the other day, an annoying election campaigner came to the house to ask about my political opinions. I threw him out on his tukkus —Yiddish for rear end, rump, or buttocks.
Lysdexia, rain garden, infant-mortality failure
Recent interesting catchwords from the Double-Tongued Dictionary are:
lysdexia n. a joking name for dyslexia, a learning disorder.
rain garden n. a piece of low, damp ground planted with vegetation that is suitable for rainwater that collects there.
infant-mortality failure n. a breakdown of a piece of machinery that is new or has recently been rebuilt.
Citjo, floppy, supermajor
Recent interesting catchwords from the Double-Tongued Dictionary are:
citjo n. a citizen journalist.
floppy n. a comic book, so-named to distinguish it from a thicker graphic novel.
supermajor n. one of the handful of very large petroleum companies.
Taking a haircut and losing your shirt
Last week I wrote about real estate, mortgage, and investment terms for the Malaysia Star. Here’s the column in full:
This past year, one of the biggest trends in language was related to real estate, housing, and home loans.
Oh, yes, those dry worlds turn out plenty of curious terms.
Probably the biggest winner in 2007 was subprime, a word that is not new but which, inexplicably, appears in none of the dictionaries I checked. I suppose that is because until this year, it was an intangible bit of euphemistic jargon.
But now, with financial crises popping up at all levels, pretty much everyone understands that the adjective subprime is used to describe a mortgage or home loan made to someone who does not have perfect financial health.
Some subprime loans are called no-doc loans, a clipping of “no documentation,” meaning that the borrower had to provide only minimal proof that they could repay the loan.
Sometimes they are called stated income loans, since all the borrower had to do was to say that they made a certain income and the bank wouldn’t take any special effort to verify it.
Still other times, such loans are called liar’s loans, which puts the truth of the matter frankly. In order to get the loans, one could seemingly say anything the lender wanted to hear.
Yet another name for such loans is NINJA loans. NINJA is an acronym for “no income, no job or assets.” It plays off the idea of darkly clad Japanese ninjas, insinuating that someone is up to no good under the cover of darkness.
Some subprime mortgages and loans are the ones that start well but end badly. In those cases, the borrower took out the loan in good faith, the lender verified all the details, and everything was done as risk-free as possible. But somewhere along the way, the borrower began to fall behind payments and the once safe loan became risky. These are known as scratch and dent loans.
The term refers, in part, to a common practice in American department and grocery stores, in which merchandise that has been damaged is sold at a discount. It could be anything: dented canned goods, stained clothing, or well-handled floor models (working examples of products that are set out for customers to examine in order to be sure that what they want to buy does what they want it to).
On Wall Street, investment companies figured out years ago that they could make safer investments out of these risky and scratch-and-dent loans by bundling them together and then retranching them. “Retranch,” from the French retrancher, means “to recut.”
In other words, investment companies take all the debt together and sell it to investors in a variety of new packages. That way, if any one of the risky mortgages failed to be paid back in time, the loss would be spread across many investors.
Of course, over the last two years, some investors have taken a haircut on these bundled investments, meaning they have had to bear large losses. They took what money they could get for them, but overall, they lost their gamble and get less back than they put in.
Of course, it isn’t just big faceless investment companies who are losing their shirts – going broke or going into debt. Homeowners are, too. Some of them are finding that their mortgages—another name for a loan against the value of a house—are exploding ARMs.
ARM is an acronym for adjustable rate mortgage, meaning that the percentage that the borrower pays to the bank above and beyond the amount originally lent can change depending upon market conditions or rates set by the government. ARMs “explode” when new interest rates are so high that the borrower can’t afford to make payments.
As more people have failed to pay their mortgages, there are now too many houses for sale and the value of all houses has dropped. Some homeowners find themselves upside down, meaning that the amount that they still have to pay for their houses was more than they could get for them if they tried to sell them.
Now the real battle comes in trying to sell a house for any amount at all. Some people used drama-pricing. It means to dramatically drop the price for which you’re selling your house.
The term first surged to popularity in 2006 as a kind of amusing little toy of a word, but last year, as the American real estate market began to take a dive (to fall rapidly in terms of number of houses sold and in the amount that they were selling for), the term took on all the more seriousness.
A less common synonym, trauma pricing, sounds to me like the perfect term for the tangled financial mess.
