Language Clippings

University of Michigan's Anne Curzan gives a great mini-lecture about slang words formed by clipping and how these words have the potential to become a standard part of the lexicon.

New Word, New Day - National Pantsing Day

As I drove my boys to school this morning they informed me that today is National Pantsing Day. National what day? Pantsing is a new word on me so I came home and looked it up. Here is the top definition from Urban Dictionary -

Pantsing: What many high school students will do to fellow classmates if they decide to wear sweatpants. It is far to easy to catch the wearer of the sweatpants off-guard and pull their sweats down. Any other form of clothing on the bottom is not to be messed with.....only sweatpants.
Poor girl decided to wear her sweats today; she's probly going to get......oh, and the pantsing begins.

This definition was posted by Whitney on May 23, 2005.

According to my boys, any pants will do; the pants do not have to be sweatpants. Either way, I learned a new slang word today and I got a good laugh at poor Whitney's spelling errors (probably because it was just too easy).

And by the way, as far as I can tell there is no such thing as National Pantsing Day...it must be something some smarty pants at my boys' school invented.

Dictionary of Antiquated words

The Virtual Linguist, recently posted about a new dictionary of slang for young people. This dictionary is unusual in that the "slang" is the language of senior citizens. The "Gran Slang" dictionary contains words that are commonly used by older people but unknown to the younger generation. Some of the included words are: higgledy-piggledy, poppycock, scallywag, tomfoolery and whippersnapper. The dictionary also includes a "Youth Slang" section for older readers.

Home and Capital, a British equity release company, claims they produced the dictionary, "to help younger people understand and communicate with their grandparents." I, however, am prone to believe that the dictionary was produced primarily as a marketing tool because as Home and Capital states, "good communication between generations is important...particularly when it comes to financial matters."


At any rate, I initially thought the idea of a "Gran Slang" dictionary was a good one until I thought about the fact that all of the "gran slang" word definitions can be found in any decent dictionary. Now I am left weighing the amount communications between generations would actually benefit from such a dictionary against the amount of laziness such a dictionary would promote in youth by discouraging them from picking up a regular dictionary to look up a word.