In the summer of my ninth year, I became a valley girl. I didn't wear the clothes, and lived too far away to shop at the malls, but the Playa Galleria and scrunchies were only the superficial trappings of valley girldom anyway. I became a valley girl in a much more authentic way: by speaking their language.
My older sister introduced me to it: incredible phrases like barf me out, gag me with a spoon, as if! and I'm so sure. And of course, the valley girls' transcendent gift to the world: like.
These words ignited my imagination. I was so in love with them, it didn't even occur to me that, being a boy who didn't live in the valley, I would be seen as a total valley girl gringo (or worse). Identity was more fluid then anyway, and besides -- my friends were all equally enraptured by the new valley language. My street suddenly became like, a tiny valley, with every conversation like, invoking gagging and barfing. Those particular words were so fun to say that you began steering your conversations toward the disgusting, just so you could voice your reaction.
Speaking of barfing, I also remember spending a lot of my childhood collecting and using different words for vomiting. Barfing, puking, throwing up, heaving, upchucking, blowing chunks, ralphing, spewing, yakking, tossing your cookies, losing your lunch: cute and funny words for the involuntary, violent expulsion of bile and half-digested food from your body, one of the most unpleasant experiences I had had at that point (weirdly, this collection has continued to grow into adulthood, and gotten much more nuanced: purging, yawning, praying to the porcelain god, driving the porcelain bus and the sophisticated craftsmanship of talking to ralph long distance on the big white telephone). As a kid this was a hard hobby to enjoy, because actual vomiting wasn't fun to think about, and adults generally didn't tolerate long or even semilong monologues about it, no matter how hilarious the phrases. Most of the time, you ended up in a verbal vomitorium of one-upmanship with another boy, each raising the stakes with a new and more unlikely word.
In the way that you can be a something person (that is, to the extent that your identity can be tied to your interests), I am, among other things, a word person. I get bored with silent films, and I can only enjoy instrumental music in small doses (at least classical music often has a suggested narrative, which I can think of as musical words. Techno and house music just sounds like the equivalent of someone saying dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance for 7 minutes straight). I love words and like thinking about using them. I get a sense of pleasure when a well-used word enters a conversation (or book, song, past-due notice, etc.), and I still get that valley-girl thrill every time I learn a new and colorful word. A good word put to a good use can give me a particular kind of pleasure I don't get anywhere else.
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Linguists can (appropriately enough) help us a lot in talking about words with the term the thing signified. Roughly, this is what you find when you look a word up in the dictionary. It's the thing which the collection of lines and curves and dots, or motions of the lungs and mouth and vocal cords, have been agreed to refer to. If there was no agreement on the thing signified by words, we'd all just be drawing and scatting, alone. The thing signified is, really, the most important part of a word. It's the part that gives power to the collection of letters thank you. There's a sense in which any marks and sounds could refer to any thing, but the reason we have words in the first place is to communicate. I think this is why we all feel such a thrill at hearing baby's first word: not because we were waiting to see what baby's voice would sound like, but because it's a promise that soon we'll be able to understand baby, and baby will understand us. Those babies who don't ever say their first word, because they are deaf or mute, must still communicate, and so learn to use the written word and the visual words of sign language to understand and be understood. I don't know if the word fart is at all funny in sign language though.
Fart brings me to to the other part of words, which can really excite a word person, and where poets can help us more: the words themselves. Not the thing signified, but the signifier. The things that make up a word as signifier include (at least): the sound of the word when it's spoken or sung, the letters that make up the words and the way those letters look together, the number of syllables, and the part (or parts) of speech played by the word. The most fun is in the sound: that's where words can sound the same (tents and tense), and of course that's where words rhyme (there once was a man from nantucket...), both long-standing sources of amusement and satisfaction for the wordly minded. The letters that make up the words are primarily of interest to spelling bee contestants and scrabble players, but then they would probably consider themselves word people too. The closest I can come to that is enjoying looking at the capitalized word Ill. I also don't have much to say about the number of syllables, except that I don't think I'm a word snob (another kind of word person, one who likes words more the more syllables they have, and likes to look down on others who don't know those ten-dollar words. Word snobs, by hogging the conversational ball, can annoy us populist word people much more than the word ignorance they mock does. And they give the rest of us a bad name: word snobs make people feel so dumb that for years Reader's Digest has had a section called It Pays to Enrich Your Ability to Beat Word Snobs at Their Own Game.
One great source of pleasure for some word people is that outside the walls of English there are uncountable other languages, full of different sounds and shapes for the thing signified, sometimes shedding different light on familiar concepts, sometimes just sounding different enough to excite our lips and our imaginations. Food lovers become word people when ordering vino or escargot, filling the pretentious police with angst ad nauseam. Fashionistas wish they had carte blanche in the presence of chic haute couture. The zeitgeist swims with cholas, faux pases, RSVPing, pro bono work and savoir faire. Über-word-person (and children's author) Lemony Snicket, in his A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Penultimate Peril, proves just how penultimate the peril is by having the three heroes arrive at the french Hotel Dénouement.
Other word people like to study the etymology of the english words they love: for example the word word comes to us from the old english word word, which means word. But -- there's more to the history of word than its old english roots: there's the aforementioned first word (who hasn't asked what their own first word was?). There's giving your word and having words. There's the supposed fact that men use 1500 words in a day and women use 3000. Jesus, not just a word person, was The Word of God. And of course, the late 20th century gave us the n*syncable agreement Word!
Word! comes to us from another of the the word person's friends: slang. Faced with the 600,000 english words in the Oxford English Dictionary, slangmakers say not enough! and keep us word people rolling in it for years to come. I think most word people wish we could make up a word that others would use, and slang seems to be the place to do just that (the only other real opportunity is being a writer: from Shakespeare's cold-blooded to J.M. Barrie's Wendy to Douglas Coupland's Generation X, writers have been exploiting their position to make up words for centuries). Besides immortality, another benefit of slang (one that the OED doesn't provide) is exclusivity. In this way, slang is like a secret password. Maybe this is why so much slang comes from people society doesn't value as it should: by saying You think you don't want me? You don't even understand what I'm saying, you turn word snobbery on it's head.
Another way that slang excites word people is by keeping language fresh. For the last twenty years, rappers have had a corner on keeping language fresh, even repurposing fresh itself. As much as a new look or a new sound, a rapper can be counted on to come up with a new word, which will become so ubiquitous that it will be discarded and replaced by the next single. And what slang rap has given us: in the last decade rappers have gotten jiggy wit it, brushed the dirt off their shoulder, admired the PHAT, and gave us the entire -izzle suffix phenomenon. When introduced to words like these, every American instantly becomes a word person, saying those words with the same thrill a 9-year-old male valley girl once had.
As for non-rap origins of slang, I'm holding a book called How We Talk: American Regional English Today by Allan Metcalf. This book says that southerners swear I'll swan and that in Miami errant missles are called rattlesnake killers. These facts are as exotic to me as a the throat clicking of the bushmen of Namibia or the tonal Mandarin and Igala languages. This book also tells me that I have my own distinguishing words like sigalert and smog, and of course the pejorative adjective mickey-mouse, our local boy made good.
The postmodern age has even given us anti-slang: When researching the 1992 article Grunge: A success story for the New York Times, a journalist phoned Megan Jasper, a sales rep for Seattle's Sub-Pop Records, and asked her for a lexicon of grunge slang. Ms. Jasper made up a list of some of the funniest words never used to represent the slang-phobic grunge scene: the semibelievable wack slacks and kickers (ripped jeans and heavy boots) sat beside the sublime swingin' on the flippety flop (hanging out) and bloated, big bag of bloatation (drunk). Due to whatever fact checking issues, the article ran in the Times, to be immediately outed by every high schooler in America. Victim of the kind of prank only a word person like Jasper could pull, I wonder whatever became of that journalist. (To complete the Escher-esque circle, Seattlites began wearing t-shirts featuring Jasper's fake term harsh realm, which was then used as the the title of a comic book and TV show in the late 90s).
Besides pranks, can someone misuse words? Certainly, but I think you can misuse them in two ways: if the origin of the misuse is ignorance, then I say no harm. You might say flammable and mean inflammable, misspell you're or mispronounce Nihilism. Those are all mild offenses in my book, and I think they are best ignored. The more insidious way that words can be misused is when they're misused in order to confuse hearers as to the thing being signified. If you call your military action Operation Kill 'em All, you may only appeal to Toby Keith fans (and maybe some confused Metallica fans). But if you call it Operation Enduring Freedom, anyone who questions it sounds suspect, and you don't even need to hear what they think about The Patriot Act. Or what if your communication becomes so twisty that you end up discussing what the definition of Is is? Al Gore fell prey to a clever word person who, while reporting, paraphrased the one-off I took the lead in creating the Internet to the clearer, more memorable and funnier I invented the Internet. In the 1970s Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer said that the real difficulty in debating Marxism was that it appropriated terms like dignity of man from other philosophies, words that it had no ability to produce on its own terms.
Every George from Washington to Carlin has already weighed in on using bad words, so the only thing I'll add is that I'm mostly just stumped by their existence: what fun are they? I think they must be another extension of our human nature to identify our boundaries and then deliberately transgress them. Why take our precious means of communication, and then begin closing it off? It's not like anyone ever intended not to say them, leaving those with sensitive consciences trapped with a loss for words -- and many watch for offensive words with such glee they are impossible to talk to. As a reserved child who wanted to please, I couldn't win: it was continually dispiriting to learn that something completely innocent in my head sounded like something bad in someone else's.
Speaking of George Carlin, comedians have long said that the sound of words alone is enough to make us laugh, words like ointment and midget and pants. David Letterman's production company (I have no idea what a production company is) is called Worldwide Pants. Frat Boys at Cal State Long Beach have been obsessed for decades with finding the mythical local Midget Town, where houses are made half-size. Would they be as interested if it was called Diminutive Town? (well, maybe so.) Then there's the notorious K sound: monkey, pickle, twinkie, funky chicken, cluck, schmuck, hockey puck. Besides bearing that sound twice in his own name, Krusty the Clown would suggest adding Mukluk to that list. I'm not sure if the KKK had comedy in mind though. It seems to me that the hard p, b and g sounds are also regularly put to funny use: pimple, piggy, bud bundy. Alliteration is frequently funny, because it subverts our expectation that our speech will sound natural and unforced: midgets might mind their manners when managing ointment.
Names are words too, and the way they sound can not only make us laugh, but even affect how we feel about the things they name. James Dettore of Brand Institute Inc., which specializes in naming prescription drugs, tells us that the best drug names are ten or less letters and three or fewer syllables. Jay Jurisch, creative director at Igor International, calls the name Viagra 'poetry,' for its use of the 'vital' vi- prefix and its conjuring of the natural power of Niagara Falls. Following the success of Viagra, three years were spent developing and testing the competitor name Levitra. We seem to like Vs, Zs and Xs in our drug names these days: consider Viagra, Levitra, Prozac, Vicodin, Xanax, Zoloft, Bextra, Vioxx, Valium, Lexapro, Atavan, Nexium, Zyrtec, Prevacid, Nuviva and Flomax.
Names are definitely a place where everyone is a word person: you probably have an opinion about how your own name sounds (and how that makes you sound), that's why you might choose to be James or Jim or Jimmy or Scarface or He Hate Me -- because you can see the power of the sound of your name in others' ears.
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Are there downsides to being a word person? Yeah, and they mostly have to do with interacting with non-word-people. The first downside is that you frequently take other people's words more seriously than they do, worrying for days about the nuances of a goodbye on the phone or the exceptionally cutting power of an insult, which the giver didn't think through and has completely forgotten. The second downside is that non-word-people don't realize or appreciate how much work you put into your own words, which makes them able to paraphrase I'm not sure if I want to stay home or not yet into he says he doesn't want to go. To a word person who chooses every word carefully, there are few conversational hardships as bad as realizing that you just weren't being listened to -- and few conversational sins can make you feel guiltier than not listening yourself.
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I'm developing an informal theory that you can tell what's important to a people group by the things they invent words for. If you test this theory out, it would mean that food is important to diner employees, that scoring points is important to ESPN anchors (who have cried He's en fuego!, Booya!, and, in the case of another über-word-person, Craig Kilborn, Jumanji!), that drugs are important to drug dealers and users (and there's that idea of exclusivity again), that tricks are important to skateboarders, that business and war were important in the 80s and that science, technology and multiculturalism were in the 90s. Lovers, important to each other, call each other hot and sweet, sugar and honey, even pumpkin and muffin, all of them food terms that should keep psychologists busy for years. And my beloved valley girls? They would have to have a soft spot for expressing disdain. As far as I can see, it all pans out.
But there's something important my theory leaves out: the universal things that don't need new words, the words that allow us to communicate with humanity throughout history. Words like human dignity. And enduring freedom. Or those famous three little words that give even word snobs a greater pleasure than three ten-dollar words could ever give. Words that go beyond giving pleasure. Words that don't just have meanings, but give meaning. In that way, we're all word people. We communicate everything that's important in our lives through words. We grow and change through the influence of words. No matter how much we word people like to think about the signifiers, the signifiers are really only meaningful and fun because of their connection to the things signified. Lewis Carroll and John Lennon can tell you that if you string enough signifiers in the wrong order, people presume that the thing signified is that you are crazy or on drugs, it won't matter to them that you just thought it sounded funny. (One last aside: when a word snob challenged John Lennon to answer for why all his songs had only one and two syllable words, he wrote Help! with the then-current psychological ten-dollar words self-assured, insecure and independence, and when he learned that a former teacher was telling students they needed to learn to interpret Lennon's words like he could, Lennon dashed off I am the eggman, I am the eggman, I am the Walrus, googoogjoob and crowed let's see them work this one out!)
Finally, I should note that according to my word processor, I've attempted to coin the words semilong, wordly, RSVPing, über-word-person, n*syncable, slangmakers and semibelievable. If there are any nine-year-olds reading this who think any of those sound good, please feel free to use them: these word-hopefuls are my gift to you, from one word person to another.
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Illustration by George Herriman and Douglas Dodgson