On (28 Oct 03) Shaman wrote to Rob McCart...
 S >  RM> Yup = slang for Yes..
 S >  Can you bring some examples of the slange ?

Well, as to "yup" you can use it everywhere you would otherwise use
"yes". . . it's considered bad form and a sign of lesser intellect, but
it's understood readily enough still as an affirmative. . .

Here's a fun article on SLANG that was posted in Fidonet's FUNNY echo:

                Don't blow your cool for a piece of cake

It may comfort you to know the expression "You've blown your cool for
a piece of cake" has a Russian equivalent. I don't know what it means
either, but just knowing they say it somehow helps me cope with life
in the English-speaking world.

Not so long ago, traveling from town to city to province meant a
change in accent, but not necessarily a change in language. But only
on the West Coast will my buddy lean over at the end of a long night
of drinking and say, "Lose the tude, dude." (Cheer up, friend!) "We
gotta blow this dump before I see snakes." (We should get a taxi and
go home; I believe I am impaired.)

If my friend were wearing enormous trousers and a toque, he might just
as easily have said, "Suck it up." (Drink the rest of your beer.)
"Let's score some bud and nail those moisties." (We should buy some
marijuana and go talk to those skinny girls with the short t-shirts
and navel jewelry.)

English is by far the richest language in the world with upwards of
one million words already in dictionaries or waiting to be catalogued.
That's about ten times as many words as most other languages. The odd
thing is, no one speaks dictionary English with the exception of
Tarzan and Mr. Spock, neither of whom are real people. And Tarzan's
command of grammar is suspect.

In the face of discrimination countrymen abroad tend to play up their
tribal characteristics. There're none so scotch as the Scots abroad,
as Celtic rockers Spirit of the West put it. At the time of the
American revolution, Americans were speaking exactly the same language
with exactly the same accent as the Red Coats they so gleefully
slaughtered after discovering you could cheat at war and get away with
it. Up to that point they were all good Englishmen speaking the King's
English.

The growth of American nationhood drove a wedge between English and
American English, to the point where each has its own dictionary, but
there could really be dozens of dictionaries.

The rate at which foreign words and technical terms are absorbed into
English is astonishing, but uneven, and that's the problem. You might
think that connecting the entire English-speaking world via computer
would promote the formation of a single, common form of English. You'd
be wrong.

If you know anyone who works with computers or writes software, you
are already aware that these geeques, or geeks as they are known in
the U.S., are no longer able to communicate with normal people. Their
speech is sprinkled with RAMs and bytes and gigs and all sorts of
unfathomable nonsense. Ask something really stupid like "What exactly
does a BIOS chip do?" and they will look at you like you are the
sexless, pencil-necked dork.

Their insubstantial contact with organic, sentient beings makes
geeques useless as a means to standardize spoken English.

American Blacks have declared their combination of pidgin grammar and
idiomatic expression a language of its own, Ebonics, named for the
black wood used to make piano keys. If Ebonics is Black English the
rest of us must be speaking Ivonics. The nonsense words and phrases
that pass for spoken English in Vancouver is no closer to the Queen's
English than the dialect of Detroit crack dealers.

Ivonics, of course, comes in thousands of sub-dialects. As the world
compresses under the pressure of technology we are forming more
exclusive sub-cultures to maintain the sense of tribal belonging.
Teenagers have been using unintelligible slang as a kind of
combination group bond and parental torture device for decades,
perhaps centuries. Now, everyone from the police to snowboarders have
their own private vernacular in which words have anything but their
literal meaning. Government communications specialists have developed
a form of English that doesn't mean anything to anyone anywhere.

It is said that Inuit languages have more than 30 words to describe
the texture of snow because of its importance to their culture. You
will be thrilled to note that Ivonics, the language of most Canadians,
has about 50 words meaning "drunk" (legless, stoned, bombed, smashed,
loaded, etc.) and at least 20 for "hooker" (pro, doxy, strumpet, loose
fish, wench, rig, baggage, mopsy, etc.). As a native speaker of
Ivonics you are well prepared for a night out on the town with a
Russian seaman and you won't have to blow your cool for a piece of
cake.


I am the moderator of FIDONET's "FUNNY Jokes and Stories" echo (come on
by!) :)

I sign in peace, as a friend,
<+]::-{(} ("Cyberpope"(the Bishop of ROM!))
Internet: gapope{at}vcn.bc.ca
Suggestions for joke conference happiness:
1)If you don't like a joke, post 2-3 examples of what you DO like!
B)If you DO like a joke, say thank-you with 2-3 jokes of your own! :)
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