Grammar Girl on backformed "verse"

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

I appreciate Arnold's thorough laying out of the issues. I'm not really arguing for any particular definition of slang. My point was mainly about the status of "verse". It's certainly not on par, slangwise, with "w00t" as Grammar Girl suggests, and I'm not even sure it's fair to call it informal; that is, from the perspective of the "verse" users. The examples that Neil discussed
(http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2005/06/07/verses-vs-versus/ )
don't suggest to me that the versers see anything informal about it; it's just a word that means what it means. That's why I suspected that it's appearing in academic writing.

-Matt Gordon
________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Arnold Zwicky [zwicky at STANFORD.EDU]
Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2012 9:20 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Grammar Girl on backformed "verse"

On Feb 19, 2012, at 6:07 AM, Matt Gordon wrote:

> I'm curious about labeling 'verse' slang as both Grammar Girl and the NYT do. My sense of how it's used doesn't suggest slang to me. I don't think that people using it consider it to be a casual/fun/hip alternative to some other verb. In this sense it's not like "pwn" or "w00t" which gamers and others use with more awareness of speaking/writing an informal style. I would guess that teachers are finding "verse" is school writing while slang of the "pwn" variety is comparatively rare.

well, there's slang and there's ostentatious slang.  but many terms labeled as slang are not used with awareness of their sociolinguistic status, and some that started out as ostentatious slang have become naturalized (while still being sociolinguistically limited). (granted, lists of "X slang" -- college slang, gamer slang, etc. -- focus on the ostentatious items.)

maybe you'd prefer that the non-ostentatious items be labeled "informal" rather than "slang".  but non-specialists tend to use "slang" for informal usages; "informal" is a (semi-)technical term not used by most non-specialists.

even the specialists are not uniform in their labeling, as you can see by looking at the way dictionaries deal with the cluster of nouns used by men as address terms to men: buddy, bud, chum, pal, kid, sport, dude, fellow, guy, mate, friend, mac, etc.  (most of these have other vocative uses and have referential uses as well, and the sociolinguistic status of the nouns in these different uses is often quite different, though only rarely noted in dictionaries.)  in any case, these uses are treated differently by different dictionaries: labeled as slang, labeled as informal, noted but not labeled, not noted at all.  i reported on a tiny bit of this vocabulary domain on my blog, here:
  http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/data-points-address-terms-111710/

back-formed "verse" isn't ostentatious, if it ever was, but is sociolinguistically restricted (though apparently spreading) and is at least informal; in fact, some would label it as non-standard.

arnold

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