Title: A Glossary of Slang Used by Informal Youth Associations
Abstract: The present glossary is an attempt to gather together words most frequently used in the environment of informal youth associations in Moscow. This should not be considered a dictionary of all youth slang. Unfortunately, Soviet philology has no precedent for such a dictionary. In Russian-language dictionaries published up to now, slang is not even mentioned as a type of vocabulary, and the category of "colloquial" words has included all words of a routine everyday character, which sometimes are even difficult to distinguish from the literary language in general (thus in the 16th edition of Ozhegov's Dictionary of the Russian Language, published in 1984, the word "shopping bag" [avos'ka] is annotated as "colloquial"). It would be an interesting and timely task to compile a dictionary of the slang of children, adolescents, and youth, but this undoubtedly would take us beyond the bounds of the present glossary. Hence, we have had to limit ourselves to slang used in informal youth associations. The glossary does not include words that, while considered slang by those who use this language, cannot be considered as specific to informal youth organizations since they have come into general usage ("box" [iashchik]—television or tape recorder; "crowd" [tolpa], the "crush" [tolchok]—the second-hand goods market [tolkuchka]; "dumplings" [varenki]—clothes boiled for bleaching; "iron" [utiug]—a small-scale black marketeer; "teapot" [chainik]—the head; etc.). However, the glossary does include some words that have been functioning in the language for quite a long time (e.g., chuvak—fellow, chuvikha—girl, which appeared back in the 1950s in the slang of the stiliagi; gerla, gerlitsa—girl; kaif—pleasure, bliss, which became prevalent even before the mass infusion of English words in hippy slang), since in my view they are exclusively characteristic of informal youth associations, although they cannot be called supermodern. Of course youth who are involved in music have their own slang (numerous professional, semi-professional, and amateur groups). There is the slang of the "near-underworld," bordering on the jargon of criminals. The boundaries between these layers of language are very fluid. Many words are reinterpreted and used with a different meaning. For example, the word soliak, from musical slang, which means "solo," is used by children and adolescents as a derivative of the word solidno ["solid"], and it is unclear whether this is a question simply of homonyms; the word obut' ("to shoe," from the slang of criminals, meaning "cheat") has undergone semantic changes among the metalists and now means "to lift, to filch," as in "he lifted my chain" [on u menia obul tsep']; the word bashliat, which in criminal jargon means "to pay money," has preserved its meaning in musical slang, but in some groups of metalists it is used to mean "to understand." On my request, many representatives of informal youth associations took part in the compilation of this dictionary, and the material they have gathered has in many respects been predetermined by their age (sniat' devuchku—to pick up a girl—is regarded by sixteen-year-olds as meaning "to get to know a girl on the street," but among older persons it has a grosser meaning), by the area of Moscow where they live (metalists from Chertanov gravitate more to the language of the underworld, while metalists of the central districts tend toward "System" slang), and by the social circles, in the sense of the social status of the persons in them. Not included in the glossary were words such as vvalivat'—to heave to, meaning to work; zakolachivat'—to nail up, meaning to earn money; zatarit'—to pack up, meaning to make home brew; since in my opinion these are colloquial words of rather low style, generally intelligible to anyone who knows Russian colloquial language, and do not constitute the specific quality of the slang that is current in the environment of informal youth associations).
Publication Year: 1990
Publication Date: 1990-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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