While flipping through an old Time magazine from 1970, I was amused to come across a list of then hip, cool, new slang words and discovers “trashed” was on the list (in the sense of “trashed the room,” rather than “drunk”). Unlike its fellow travelers “outasite” or “do your thing,” trashed has actually stayed in the language; it’s become so normal a word, it was jarring to see it presented as a linguistic novelty.
I love old and obscure words and slang and I love using them in fiction, since it’s one way to create a feel for another time or place: Throw in a slang term or a curse that’s now archaic (in medieval times, for instance, the really foul language was shockingly blasphemous phrases such as “By our saviour’s tears!” or “By the true cross!”) and it helps set the period.
While I have a lot of words books that provide examples of that sort of language, however, it’s frustrating that I’m not always sure how much to trust them. One of my books, for instance, refers to “flunkenstein” as a sixties term for a computer that grades standardized tests. Was that something that saw regular use, a name used at maybe one college or just something someone made up that never actually caught on? I can’t tell, which makes me cautious about using it.
In the end, I usually play it careful, unless I’m working with language that I know, such as sixties or seventies slang I heard growing up (or even fifties slang which filtered into TV shows a few years later). A shame, some of the old words are just so neat.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 9:37 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.