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

[Douglas G. Wilson]

><<"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.

Of course the slang terms are packed in more densely than in real life. I
think each individual term quoted was intended to be genuine, and probably
most were genuine. However, one cannot assume wide currency of each term
since the informants were doubtless prone to give the journalists the most
grotesque (and thus memorable) items which came to mind as well as some
common ones and some brand-new ones (some of which may have lasted only a
week, used by only a small clique). Of course all newspaper reporting is
and was very susceptible to plain gross errors too.

-- Doug Wilson