Spectacular Vernacular -- Slang May Be Cool, But It's History, Man

Yo, dudes.

You fly? You cool?

You hip to what's sweet, tight, chillin', crazy, def, kickin', killer, phat, bad, heavy, smokin', papa, stupid, fresh, wicked?

You dig what's awesome, tubular, gnarly, happenin', hot, choice, decent, outrageous, primo, smokin', solid, outstanding, rad, way gone?

Into what's groovy?

Insanely great?

In that case, man, Tom Dalzell speaks your language. This homeboy from Bryn Mawr, Pa. - he's, like, the main man of extraordinary vocabulary, the Big Kahuna of spectacular vernacular.

To translate: He is an avid logophile with a particular love of argot you didn't learn from your parents. He has written a history of patter that captures the sound of hot-rodders and hippies, soda jerks and surfers, beatniks and break dancers, "From Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang" (Merriam Webster, $14.95).

In 230 pages, Dalzell combs the decades - going back to the 1850s, when hard up meant "the butt of a joke" and diked out meant "dressed up stylishly."

What amazed Dalzell in searching out the history of slang words is that so many slang words have a history.

"Far out and out of sight," Dalzell is saying. "We think of these as quintessential words from the 1960s. They come from the 1890s. With exactly the same meanings. Stephen Crane, in `Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,' at times spelled out of sight: outta sight."

Crane's book appeared in 1893. Author Frank Norris used far out in "McTeague" (1899) to mean "extreme and imaginative."

The argot of rap and hip-hop, which sounds so original - much of it dates from 1940s jive.

"Fly girl - a big rap word. Charles Dickens used fly in 1853, with the same meaning: `cunning, sly, in the know,' " Dalzell says. In a 1940s recording by Cab Calloway, you can hear the background singers going, "Are you hep to the jive? Yeah, yeah / Are you fly? Are you fly?"

"Phat. You'll find phat in the early 1960s spelled that way, then later you'll see it fat. The spellings go back and forth, but the meaning is the same."

Some people think phat is an acronym for "pretty hips and thighs," but Dalzell doubts it. Fat has been a synonym for "rich" since the 1600s, and Dalzell figures it evolved from there. Hy Lit, the fast-talking Philadelphia disc jockey of the golden oldie era, nailed the word in his 1968 "Hy Lit Dictionary": "great, cool, you dig it."

Dead presidents, meaning "money." Homey: "someone from your hometown." Rap words now, they were jive 50 years ago.

"I would guess," Dalzell says, "that virtually every rapper would think that fly's a new word, or whack or dead president is new."

Why did these words - and others, like copacetic (the 1920s) and Not! (the 1930s) - spring up some distant time ago, only to disappear, then re-emerge generations later?

"The best answer I got," says Dalzell, "was from Robert Chapman, the senior dean of American slang. What he said was really funny: `It's what the shrinks call overdetermined. Which is another way of saying: We don't know."'

Dalzell chortles. He's a friendly 45-year-old with a high forehead and a rumpled sport coat. A scion of Philadelphia's Main Line, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Then he headed west, working eight years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers before passing the California bar without the nuisance of going to law school.

He lives in Berkeley, Calif., where he works as a lawyer for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and reads the lyric sheets to rap records owned by his 15-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter.

He began collecting slang a decade ago while researching period speech for a novel he was writing. Soon his absorption in the language supplanted his interest in the fiction. Ten years later, his slang library numbers more than 1,000 books and 2,000 articles and pamphlets.

Unlike Chapman, the authority who edits "The New Dictionary of American Slang," Dalzell does not believe that teens speak in slang as a way of way of keeping their parents and teachers in the dark. "My sense is that teens do not even use slang in front of adults," Dalzell says.

Rather, he says, slang's function is to change the level of conversation to the informal. To identify young people as members of a group. To establish station with peers. And to satisfy youth's drive to defy authority. "Satiric, vulgar, witty, and skeptical, youth slang is often quite oppositional," he writes.

Baby boomers learned most of their early slang from AM radio disc jockeys like Wolfman Jack, Jerry "The Geater with the Heater" Blavat, Jocko Henderson ("Hey, yon teen-agers, hit that thing, hey hey ho ho . . .").

Those DJ's got it from black jive, by way of the Beat movement of the 1950s. And it reaches back further than that.

"The real birth of American youth slang was in the '20s, with the flapper," Dalzell says, recalling the gin-guzzling, bob-haired, corsetless free spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald memory.

"In retrospect, it was kind of dopey and very white," Dalzell says, "but it was a great generation, the first real generation of youth." It's when grungy meant "envious," a holaholy was someone who objected to necking, and when things were good, they were hotsy-totsy.

Temperatures cooled when the '30s - and the Depression - rolled in. "You've got Joe College and the soda jerk, but a very conservative kind of youth culture," Dalzell says.

"But in 1935, boom - comes swing music. Black culture is right there."

It had come up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, to Harlem and Chicago and other African-American centers. With the explosion of swing and the jitterbug, the patois of black jazz musicians crept into the idiom of white teens:

If you went to college, you went to jail. A deuce of haircuts was two weeks. Trucking was a dance at Harlem's Cotton Club (to be resurrected by comic artist R. Crumb in the 1960s). Coffee was mud, fascinate was kill, an attorney was a lip.

To the lexicographer, youth slang is a humongous challenge.

Consider "hip" - "the hardest-working word in 20th-century slang, bar none," in Dalzell's appraisal.

It starts off as hip or hep in 1904 among wise guys on Broadway. In the '30s, it transmogrifies into hipster, hepster, hep cat. In the '50s, it was hippy, meaning someone who thought he was hip, but wasn't (see phish, 1990s). About 1965, people started calling hippies those longhairs that beatniks were evolving into. Then comes hip-hop.

"So it's a huge word," Dalzell says, "that's played a big role in every generation. And there's absolutely no agreement on where either hip or hep come from."

Some say the terms stem from a wrestling term, "to have on the hip" (meaning to be in complete control of the opponent). Or it's a liquor reference (from the hip flask). Or a drug reference (opium smokers lie on their hips). Or from Joe Hep's saloon in Chicago, a beehive of underworld gossip.

Yaddee yaddee yaddee.

Lately, Dalzell has come up with the most plausible explanation yet. In the Wolof language, from the part of West Africa that was the homeland of many South Carolina slaves, "hepi" means "to open one's eyes, to be aware of what's going on." "Degi" means "to appreciate or pay attention to."

"That's pretty close," Dalzell smiles.

Dig it.