US Slang Expressions

[psychic_serpent]

bboy wrote:

toasted, fried, baked, burnt, burned, burned out, crispy critter, and
many others --- means someting is severly worn or broken. 'My car is
toasted', 'This computer is completely burnt', etc... Comes from 
hippy drug culture where burnt meant your brain was temporarily or
permanantly damaged by excessive drug use, as in, 'I's really burnt
after late nights party'.

Me:

A slang expression related to the ones above is, "Stick a fork in 
me; I'm done."  Same idea, more colorful way of putting it, although 
it's a bit over at this point.

Which brings me to--"That's so over."  It means passe, out of date, 
cliched, etc.  It's not hard to pick up on this one from context.

I also winced the first time I heard my son say, "My bad."  Now I 
actually use it myself. ::hangs head::  It means, "My mistake."

We also have slang that's just used in our family.  "Nooge" for 
instance (start off like you're pronouncing "nook" and then change 
the "k" to a soft "g") is an affectionate term for someone who's 
being particularly silly.  "Gurnk" is something my husband coined 
years ago meaning either, "I'm basically happy and I hope you are 
too" or "I hope you're okay," often used in place of "Bless you" 
or "Gezundheit" when someone has sneezed.  (When we've done this in 
the presence of other people, boy do we get the weird looks!) 
Variation: Gurnky-doodles.  No, I did not marry Ned Flanders.  Stop 
looking at me like that. ;)

Other slang we use: "He's/she's a friend" which we use to mean 
basically the same thing as "friend of Dorothy."  Refers to the 
character of Dorothy in the wizard of Oz, who was played by Judy 
Garland, who is revered by many gay folks and was gay-friendly 
herself.  By extension, a "friend" means someone else who's gay-
friendly.  Some folks only use "friend of Dorothy" to mean someone 
who's actually gay him/herself.  I don't know whether this is 
exclusive to the US; it might be used in other English-speaking 
countries as well.
 
When my husband and I moved in together two years before we married, 
my dad called it "shacking up," which I believe is also used in 
other English-speaking countries.  You can tell that he was really 
pleased about this, right? ;)

Some folks brought up Ebonics, but I think there's a basic 
misunderstanding between the difference between cultural grammatical 
variations and true slang. It is possible to learn the conventions 
of Ebonics or, say, the version of English spoken by the 
Pennsylvania Germans. ("The car needs washed" rather than "The car 
needs to be washed.")  OTOH, slang or idiomatic expressions can 
often be figured out from context, but they usually cannot be taken 
literally and there aren't rules for how idiom is created.  

It was said that when the first President Bush was in office, 
translators of his speeches for the world-wide audience had an awful 
time converting his words because he spoke almost ENTIRELY in 
idiom.  It wasn't just a matter of converting his grammar from the 
down-home way he liked to express himself to more 'standard' English 
before translating.  There just weren't literal translations of 
many, many things he said, and when translators did attempt to be 
literal, some very comical results often occurred.

For instance, there's the old term "Bronx cheer" used to refer to a 
raspberry (which in turn is used to refer to the noise made when 
blowing air across one's tongue when it's held firmly between the 
teeth, making both the tongue and lower lip vibrate rapidly and 
often causing saliva to be expelled from the mouth).  "Bronx cheer" 
is meant to be ironic; this rather rude noise is quite the opposite 
of a cheer.  The first President Bush was fond of saying things 
like, "I give that idea a big ole Bronx cheer," or, "a big ole 
raspberry."  Translators who didn't realize that this wasn't a GOOD 
thing really went a bit off in what they were communicating to the 
rest of the world.

On a related note, the Razzies are a bunch of awards given to the 
worst of everything during a given calendar year; it's short 
for "raspberry," so even though these are awards, you REALLY don't 
want to win one.

--Barb, who never really thought before about the mechanics of 
producing a raspberry

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Psychic_Serpent
http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Barb