en-us Copyright 2008 - All Rights Reserved. Fri, 24 May 2013 08:29:33 GMT 15 By Beth Kozicki
"Dude, this chick asked me to chillax but she had a total muffin top so I said whatevs." Most high school students would be able to easily and quickly understand what this phrase meant without any deciphering tool. As high school students are growing up and recognizing their own freedoms, they create and use new words. Some people, such as Anne Curzan and Michael Adams, authors of the book "How English Works," believe that slang words are prevalent in high schools because teens want to rebel against what their parents have taught them. Others believe that the slang words used have come from the TV or music, which often come from different communties, which are seperated by such things as ethnicity, religion, age and geography. They believe that slang is a sort of melting pot of popular culture. "People use slang for a number of reasons, but the main one is to express thoughts in a way that has some kind of rhetorical impact that derives from its very informality," Editor at-Large of the Oxford English Dictionary Jesse Sheildlower said. The dialect that high school students create separates boundaries between different groups of people, or designate individualism and creativity within a group or community. For example, when a slang word gets too popular, or it spreads too far from a certain social group, the word is replaced to keep the group unique. It is for this reason that when a parent, teacher, or someone in the media sticks their nose into teenage language and attempts to use high schooler dialect, the word is then thrown away and is not to be used again. But sometimes, slang terms make a comeback, such as a 'foxy' individual, or a 'grody' lunch menu. The term 'grody' was first coined in the eighties, but made a comeback a number of years ago at the Fort Atkinson Middle School. 'Foxy' was used widely during the majority of high school students' parents, but is once again being used to describe a particularly attractive individual. But is the use of slang a bad thing? Is it ruining the english language like some teachers could lead one to believe? "There's nothing inherently wrong with slang, but there are things that can be wrong about using it, depending on context. If you are writing a formal academic paper, or delivering a talk to a formal audience, using slang would in general be inappropriate," Sheildlower said. There are times when slang terms are acceptable and times when they are not. As long as students do not use these words in any formal setting, slang terms do not seem to be much of a problem for anyone in particular. ]]> Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:06:55 GMT