Recently encountered an annotated transcription of a podcast from 2007 covering a wide variety of Australian slang terms.
Recently in the Slang Category
Recently happened across two useful online glossaries, probably while editing a story:
The other morning, as I was waking up, it occurred to me that I pretty much never hear the word "nix," but I do occasionally hear the Pig Latin word "ixnay." Usually in the construction "ixnay on the [something in Pig Latin]." Like: "ixnay on the alkingtay."
I wondered whether "ixnay" is becoming an English word in its own right. Although come to think of it, I don't think I often encounter it in a non-Pig Latin context (like *"ixnay on the talking"), which seems to suggest it's not widely considered valid English.
And then I wondered whether people do still use "ixnay," or whether I've just seen it so much in older books that I think of it as common.
Anyway, I made a mental note to write an entry about this at some point, and then forgot about it.
And then a couple hours later, I came across the then-latest strip of the webcomic Darths & Droids, which used the "ixnay" construction.
And the strip's forum topic included some discussion of exactly my questions. And several of the commenters there said they've been known to use "nix" sometimes.
Also, MW11 doesn't list "ixnay" as a valid English word.
Anyway, partly I'm posting 'cause I think it's an interesting topic, but partly just because I was amused by the coincidence.
I'm reading a science fiction story published in 1958: "Eastward Ho!", by William Tenn. It posited a post-Collapse future in which white people live in low-tech poverty, while American Indians are redeveloping high tech.
And I just came across this line of narration:
All the same, the Indians were so queer, and so awesome.
And it's true that there are some awesome queer Indians. But somehow I don't think Tenn meant quite the same thing that I mean by those words.
I continue to be intrigued by the differences between British/American English and Indian English.
I also wonder regularly if some of the grammatical problems I see in submissions written by South Asian writers are merely examples of Indian English. Some day, I should sit down and read more published South Asian writing to try and get a better feel for Indian English.
(I've read a few novels by South Asian authors, but not enough for a representative sample yet.)
See also: the online Dictionary of Indian English; 108 varieties of Indian English; a 2004 paper from Language in India on linguistic majority-minority relations in India; and a page of audio pronunciations of English words in New Delhi.
That last, btw, is from the extremely useful-looking Accents of English from around the world website. I hope to spend some time poking around there and listening to pronunciations in the future.
Variety has been using idiosyncratic and hyperbolic slang for about a hundred years now: ankle, biopic, boffo, chopsocky, helm, hoofer, nix, oater, percenter, scribbler, skein, sudser, terp, warble, whammo, yawner, etc.
It turns out that the official website now provides a glossary page explaining a lot of their terms.
Some of the terms listed are not specific to Variety, of course. But some words that have become common in everyday use—such as "sitcom"—were apparently coined by Variety.
Just encountered a comment in an article on Britain's Got Talent that refers to "a dancer who was show[ing] her thrupennie bits to the world."
Thruppence, or the threepenny bit, was, of course, a British coin worth three pence.
And "thrupenny bits" turns out to be Cockney rhyming slang for "tits."
