{"id":17625,"date":"2018-09-23T12:09:21","date_gmt":"2018-09-23T19:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17625"},"modified":"2018-09-23T12:10:44","modified_gmt":"2018-09-23T19:10:44","slug":"grunge-lexicon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/09\/23\/grunge-lexicon\/","title":{"rendered":"Grunge lexicon"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Apparently I never posted here about the Lexicon of Grunge. The short version is that in 1992, the <cite>New York Times<\/cite> did an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1992\/11\/15\/style\/grunge-a-success-story.html\">article about grunge music and fashion<\/a>, for which (among other things) they interviewed record-company employee Megan Jasper about what terms were in use by the grunge community. But Jasper made up a bunch of terms and phrases, and the <cite>NYT<\/cite> printed them.<\/p>\r\n<p>PRI\u2019s <cite>Studio 360<\/cite> recently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pri.org\/stories\/2018-09-20\/swingin-flippity-flop-grunge-speak-hoax\">interviewed Jasper<\/a>, who\u2019s now CEO of Sub Pop Records, and she talks about the Lexicon incident. (The relevant bit of the 10-minute audio segment on that page doesn\u2019t start until about four minutes in; or you can read the text article, which covers most of the relevant stuff.) One thing that I find especially interesting here is that Jasper thought the <cite>Times<\/cite> reporter was at some point going to realize that she was making stuff up; but from my point of view, I\u2019m not sure why they would have figured that out. Subcultural slang often sounds ridiculous to outsiders; I don\u2019t see a reason that the reporter should have thought <i>swingin\u2019 on the flippity-flop<\/i> was any less plausible as slang than, say, <i>far out<\/i> or <i>gnarly<\/i> or <i>hella<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n<p>I do think, though, that the <cite>Times<\/cite> perhaps ought to have done some fact-checking before publishing, just verifying with another source that the information they\u2019d received was accurate.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slang"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17625"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17628,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17625\/revisions\/17628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}