Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

I’m Calling No Jiggy

One of the worst things an unhip person can do is attempt to co-opt hipster/street lingo into their own stilted vocabularies. It is cringingly horrible to hear some middle aged white guy telling another middle-aged white guy that he has been “dissed” by his “ho”, or that he went out and bought some “bling” at the mall yesterday. Whenever I hear stuff like that I want to claw out my eyes and crawl into my own mouth and curl up and die.

I think the worst instance of this is the whole “getting jiggy with it” phenomenon. I’m not even sure if this was ever an authentic piece of slang: ie whether it started among the cool and slowly worked its way down the chain to the pathetic, or whether it went straight to video, so to speak. But what’s unequivocally true is that it’s now so radioactive that it should be absolutely banned from the language. Thou shalt not speak the words “get” and “jiggy” in succession, nor within the same sentence, yea verily nor even on the same day. Not even in a spirit of sarcasm. So it is written. So it shall be.

Here’s a particularly egregious example:

How many times have you been on a plane, rocking out on your iPod, when you realize you want to Get Jiggy Wit It. You stare at horror upon your entirely Will Smith devoid iPod and sob quietly in your seat.

Note the crafty dropping of the “h” at the end of “Wit”, so as to notch the cringe factor up beyond ten to some heretofore unexplored realm of horror.

These people must be stopped.

it doesn’t translate. it is irksome at best and trendy at worst. intentional misspelling is ten times as abrasive as accidental misspelling.

what is happening to language? many people today communicate almost entirely in abbreviations and anagrams, lol, rotfl, wtf, how many hundred other colloquial phrases shrunken down to the first letters of the words? oh yes by all means let’s turn contemporary idioms into abbreviations and then the abbreviations into psuedo-standardized communication, my my what a brilliant anecdote to illiteracy.

we are entering a dark age.

Hmmm…

With much respect to the author thereof, I’m not sure I agree with the above comment.

A good many of the words we use now are “misspellings”, contractions, or out-and-out bastardizations of earlier terms. One that immediately springs to mind is “goodbye” a contraction of “God be with you”. I’m sure, if they’d had blogs a few hundred years ago there would have been a lot of comments lamenting the fact that hideous, incomprehensible slang terms like “goodbye” are replacing “proper” English…

Same thing with can’t, don’t, won’t… they began life as slang terms used by the upper (read powerful/wealthy/lazy) classes and eventually filtered “down” to the masses. Nobody would accuse one of using “slang” if one said “I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand what the kids are saying these days…”

Unless a language has been pronounced completely dead, it’s a living, evolving thing; and it evolves through the tension between people who think they’re speaking “properly” and those who introduce their own terms into the language to distinguish themselves from the norm. Right now, our language is beeing bombarded with new terms from “the Internet” and from the (typically poorer) “urban” classes. These days, slang terms tend to filter “up” rather than “down” – and I suspect that this is what annoys some people more than anything (not anyone posting or commenting on this blog, of course!). 100, 200 years from now, the way we speak now – our “proper” English – will sound ancient and strange to “tha kidz” ;)

That said, “getting Jiggy wit it” should definitely be banned! It’s just wrong!

dear magpie i recognize your point, and think we’re talking about 2 different things. as a linguist i am always curious about what language is doing and i suppose it’s simply my antiquated grammarian schooling that sets my teeth on edge when i can’t find one single “real” word in, say, a text message

i have no problem with the evolution of the english language, and in terms of speaking, regional idioms & new usages fascinate me

however, i do have a problem with what i see as the loss of real written communication through recognizeable words rather than with symbols and abbreviations and anagrams and what have you

i work with “kidz” who IM eachother all day long but honestly can’t formulate a complete written sentence

all i can say is my younger office colleagues just know something is wrong when their mothers use the word ‘bling’.

bling is not a word for those in their late fifties. actually, come to think of it, i don’t know who should really be allowed to use it.