J. Davidson - Planet Word

These teenagers derive real pleasure from their language, constantly creating or borrowing new words, rejecting old ones. The students give a quick run-down on current school slang.

‘When some people say you’re cool, they say, “you got swag”.’

‘If I say “swag points”, it means that you just said something hella cool.’

Hella puts emphasis on everything — that girl’s hella pretty. Hella has become so much part of North Californian vocabulary that scientists have been lobbying for it to join the likes of mega and giga as an internationally accepted prefix for a number with twenty-seven zeros.

Arkotalko , apparently, is a brand new word for awkward. A scrub is a loser and a cuddy is a friend, as is cuzzo, homie and dog. And if you go hypi , you go crazy.

The students talk about the role played by music and dance moves in the spread of slang words.

‘There are certain words used in certain areas because there are certain dances and certain movements going off in different areas. Like when you say a “hyfi” in Oakland, they call it “the hyfi woman” and then in LA, it was a dance called “jerking”. And that was a major thing in LA. People still did it in different areas but it’s major areas where things start and where they’re most popular.’

‘It can start anywhere. Even if it’s started in some weird town in Ohio, it’s all about the song. ’Cos when you put a song on iTunes, everyone in the world can hear it. So that’s kind of just how it spreads.’

Hip-hop and Rap

Pop culture from the early twentieth century onwards has injected countless new words and expressions into our language. As the students from Berkeley High point out, music acts as a vector for words; one of the most influential forms these days is hip-hop and rap.

Hip-hop is a style of music which started in the 1970s in the United States amongst the African-American and Jamaican-American communities of the big cities. It began with disc jockeys creating rhythmic beats by repeating small portions of songs on two turntables. This was later accompanied by rap, which is the lyrical part of hip hop, a sort of verbal rhyming chanted over the beats. Rapping is also called MCing or emceeing , short for Master of Ceremonies.

H. Samy Alim, a professor of linguistic anthropology at California’s Stanford University, specializes in black language and hip-hop culture. In the company of rapping DJ Kenard ‘K2’ Karter, he discusses how rapping can be seen as an extension of an African-American oral tradition that stretches back through the passionate oratory of the black preachers to the generation-to-generation storytelling of the slaves.

‘The word rap,’ says Professor Alim, ‘was used in the black community long before it was associated with music. If you could rap, that was your talking ability … The gift of the gab.’

‘It’s metaphors,’ adds ‘K2’. ‘The hip-hoppers we see today aren’t just describing their own experiences; they’re describing the experiences of others.’

Professor Alim is excited by the linguistic daring of rap: ‘The MCing or rapping is a verbal art form that depends on your delivery, your lyrical inventiveness, your ability to create new rhyming structures. It’s something that really speaks the truth to you — a punchline that could be funny and makes people want to rewind and hear it again or a story that’s really powerful and moving and gives you goose bumps and the hair on your neck stands up.’

Rappers have different styles of what’s called ‘flow’, the rhymes and rhythms of their lyrics, with names like ‘The Chant’ and ‘The Syncopated Bounce’ and ‘Straight Forward’. Staying on the beat is crucial as, of course, is not stumbling mid-flow; the smallest falter would ruin the whole effect. For rapping to work, it’s got to be perfect, and as in most things practice makes perfect. So how does a rapper practise his art? Clearly not alone in the bedroom.

‘You step up into the cipher,’ explains Professor Alim. ‘A cipher is like this: we’re having a little cipher right now, we’ve got a circular group. We’re talking together, we’re building together. As an MC you’re in a cipher of MCs, you’re building on each other, sharpening your skills. It’s like a lyrical testing ground, a battling ground, a stomping ground.’

Ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul — African-American music has always crossed over into the broader American culture, bringing with it the language of cat and hip and funky and hot and cool and chill . Clearly hip-hop has travelled the same route, its music and slang adopted by people throughout American society. Professor Alim gives an example of how a phrase which seems to start in the music world gets taken up by the broader culture and then gets degraded.

‘I was in the locker room, working out in the gym, and there’s a white gentleman of about sixty talking on his cellphone. He ended his conversation and he said, “All right, hit me back later.” And I thought, “What? Since when … ?” ’

It’s an example of cultural appropriation which these rap experts have mixed feelings about. Here’s ‘K2’:

‘From a language perspective, hip-hop becomes the reward for describing social linguistic differences in culture or describing the experience. It’s the modern-day expression for saying, “It’s okay for us to have differences and we can share our experiences, and I don’t have to totally get it.” ’

‘And that,’ adds Professor Alim, ‘is what some people view as cultural theft. Where it’s a positive borrowing, it could be a building of relationships across racial lines. But it can also be viewed within a context of racial discrimination that goes back decades and decades — I can borrow your language but I’m sure as hell not going to borrow your experience.’

Professor Alim thinks that rap’s short, to-the-point sentences make it an ideal language for Twitter and Facebook. It’s one of the reasons why, from Tokyo to Timbuktu, rap has such widespread youth appeal and why, in 2011, this verbal art form is having such a profound affect on social movements around the world.

A rap by a twenty-one-year-old is thought to have helped bring down the Arab dictatorship of Tunisia. Hamada Ben Amor — aka El General — was arrested after he recorded and uploaded a rap protest song on to Facebook. ‘Rais Le Bled’ (‘President, Your People’) is an extraordinarily brave personal message to the now former President Ben Ali: ‘My president, your country is dead / People eat garbage / Look at what is happening / Misery everywhere / Nowhere to sleep / I’m speaking for the people who suffer / Ground under feet.’

Crucially, it was recorded in Arabic, so it spread like wildfire on the social networks, from Casablanca to Cairo and beyond. Ben Amor’s arrest seems to have inflamed the protests, with even more young Tunisians taking to the streets. Within a week, Ben Amor had been released, President Ben Ali had fled the country and the protest rap was being listened to throughout the Arab region.

As another Tunisian rapper, Balti, commented after the overthrow of the old regime: ‘The revolution is a social movement, and rap is always talking about social issues. We come from very tough neighbourhoods and we talk in our songs about social problems such as unemployment. We feel like our voices didn’t get to the regime, to the top officials, but thank God our voices were heard by the people, so we were the fuel of our revolution.’