Teen slang (1952): "nerd", "pashpie", "book gook", "jizzy", etc.

Sean Fitzpatrick grendel.jjf at VERIZON.NET
Sat Aug 7 06:50:59 UTC 2004


<<"Hey Dad, can I borrow the bug to go to the hecklethon? I've got a date with a pashpie who is a real wheel and not a bit pink.">>

Does anyone recall teen slang actually being used so densely?  Or very much at all?  Granted, the sample sentence is a journalistic confection, but I've always suspected the journalists were confecting more than sample sentences.

In 1952 I was still seven years shy of being a teenager, but I had a certain amount of contact with older kids.  During the '50s and my own teen years I would read articles like the one cited and find the purported slang as exotic as the putative adult reader was expected to.  Any of my adolescent peers who uttered such a string of incomprehensible jargon would have put his reputation seriously at risk.  At best he would have been regarded as being affected, as though he had pounded the side of the car door while crying "Hubba!  Hubba!  Oh you kid!".

Seán Fitzpatrick
It's a Gnostic thing.  You wouldn't understand.
http://www.logomachon.blogspot.com/



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