Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

flashbak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 63 posts

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#31

Post by throw0101a »

bedobi wrote: post #15

"Hoodlum lingo"... Reminds me a bit of something a random thought I had: How would you feel if you were constantly told your manner of speech was "wrong" and you constantly felt pressured not to use it? Would it be OK for Australian employees to be pressured to not speak Australian English, since it's indisputably in many ways different from "Standard English"? (whatever that is) Of course not, right? To the contrary…

> Would it be OK for Australian employees to be pressured to not speak Australian English, since it's indisputably in many ways different from "Standard English"? (whatever that is)

At least Australians spell colour properly, with an 'u'…

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#32

Post by Cthulhu_ »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #23
bedobi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah nah mate, the example is good. Assume you're not dropping the c bomb all the time. The point is, no one would say it's OK to pressure speakers to not speak Australian English. And not only are they not stigmatized the way AAVE speakers are, in addition to that, it's kind of expected that people who work with Australians make an effort to get used to and understand the Australian variety of English. That certainl…

Maybe because AAVE is just bad English and is intrinsically understood by people that going to a place and learning localisms is not the same as impersonating another individual. Furthermore, in the current social spectrum it would take no time for someone even trying to be accused of cultural appropriation... no thanks.

You perceive it to be bad English, others perceive it as the language and colloquialisms they grew up with, making it part of themselves. Some white guy like you coming in and scoffing at it as bad english really isn't helping and shows both your perceived privilege and elitism, and your ignorance.

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#33

Post by fenomas »

Anyone interested in this stuff, definitely read up on gunsel and gooseberry lay if you haven't:

https://www.miskatonic.org/gooseberry.html

In short, it's a story of Dashiell Hammett setting out to sneak a then-unpublishable bit of slang (gunsel) past his editor, and as a result giving the word an entirely new meaning (which has now become accepted usage).

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#34

Post by Cthulhu_ »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #13

To what extent does this jargon change over time?

A lot; I'm sure there's new jargon showing up everywhere and becoming disused everywhere as we speak.

I mean in recent years, newish words (mainly in the Reddit sphere) like cringe, based and poggers came up.

It would be swell/cool/dank/based/lit/dope/radical to have an overview of these terms and trends over the years. For the past 15ish years, Google Trends could be used: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cringe,p...

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#35

Post by tclancy »

rsynnott wrote: post #28
ceilingcorner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called relativism and it’s a natural position to take if you think there are no useful prescriptive standards, only descriptions of how people act. I guess that might be appealing for some people, but for others the ideas of quality and correctness are important. Unfortunately this has been mixed up with discussions about race which makes it basically impossible to publicly support any sort of language standa…

It seems to be more or less uniquely an American issue? As far as I know, no-one is going around demanding that people from Yorkshire or Kerry or other places with significant language variation speak standard English. > ideas of quality and correctness What does this mean, for English? For instance, you say "I guess"; that's a neologism, and would probably upset really extreme prescriptivists. Where should the line…

This can’t possibly be only American unless you’re suggesting chavs and kevs stopped existing overnight.

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#36

Post by pelagicAustral »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #32
pelagicAustral wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because AAVE is just bad English and is intrinsically understood by people that going to a place and learning localisms is not the same as impersonating another individual. Furthermore, in the current social spectrum it would take no time for someone even trying to be accused of cultural appropriation... no thanks.

You perceive it to be bad English, others perceive it as the language and colloquialisms they grew up with, making it part of themselves. Some white guy like you coming in and scoffing at it as bad english really isn't helping and shows both your perceived privilege and elitism, and your ignorance.

Dont hold back...

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#37

Post by wxnx »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #27
bedobi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ideas of quality and correctness are important Quality and correctness are important! And AAVE does have and enforce both. If you answered a question like "where be the car?" with "it be on the road" or "it's on the road" when in fact it be in the garage, you would be grammatically incorrect. I bet you have no idea what habitual be even is or how it works. (I didn't) And it all begs the question, why, in the US, is…

It’s considered incorrect because the combined cultural output of the previous five centuries established an educated baseline as to what is considered proper. It’s not simply an arbitrary designation or a consequence of “privilege” and culture isn’t just an empty variable that is selected randomly. The point about Australian English is irrelevant. Australian English is correct in Australia and incorrect in America,…

The notion of a standard language is a modern idea (not in the sense of modern vs. postmodern, but historically).

The idea that the only valid basis for distinguishing between dialects is geography strikes me as odd, but suppose we accept it as a premise. Why is it less valid to allow correctness to be defined, say, with respect to local borders as opposed to the borders between countries?

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#38

Post by rsynnott »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #30
rsynnott wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be more or less uniquely an American issue? As far as I know, no-one is going around demanding that people from Yorkshire or Kerry or other places with significant language variation speak standard English. > ideas of quality and correctness What does this mean, for English? For instance, you say "I guess"; that's a neologism, and would probably upset really extreme prescriptivists. Where should the line…

I don’t know enough about the UK to give you an educated answer. It’s my impression that variations are mostly in the accent and vocabulary, not the actual conjugation of verbs like “to be.” Is that correct? The conflict would be if Kerry dialect speakers started insisting that the BBC write articles in their dialect and not in the society-wide one.

> It’s my impression that variations are mostly in the accent and vocabulary, not the actual conjugation of verbs like “to be.” Is that correct?

No, not necessarily. Some examples here: https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/gram...

> The conflict would be if Kerry dialect speakers started insisting that the BBC write articles in their dialect and not in the society-wide one.

Kerry's in Ireland, not the UK. However, the BBC has had newsreaders with regional dialects for a while (since WW2!: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-north-england-... )

In terms of written news, the BBC has news in West African Pidgin (which is on the cusp between being a dialect and a language; it's comprehensible to English speakers): https://www.bbc.com/pidgin . They also have some content in Scottish English (a dialect) and in Ulster Scots (generally considered a separate language, but largely comprehensible to English speakers).

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#39

Post by ceilingcorner »

wxnx wrote: post #37
ceilingcorner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s considered incorrect because the combined cultural output of the previous five centuries established an educated baseline as to what is considered proper. It’s not simply an arbitrary designation or a consequence of “privilege” and culture isn’t just an empty variable that is selected randomly. The point about Australian English is irrelevant. Australian English is correct in Australia and incorrect in America,…

The notion of a standard language is a modern idea (not in the sense of modern vs. postmodern, but historically). The idea that the only valid basis for distinguishing between dialects is geography strikes me as odd, but suppose we accept it as a premise. Why is it less valid to allow correctness to be defined, say, with respect to local borders as opposed to the borders between countries?

I didn’t say it was geography. American culture is mostly separate from Australian culture. As the US is a unified cultural element, it’s not surprising that a single standard had been established. The downsides of the lack of this are easy to observe: just look at the EU. No single unified language, no unified market, less economic power. Making a Netflix for America requires 1 language, while making a Netflix for the EU requires 29. China isn’t pushing Mandarin everywhere just for chauvinist “cultural superiority” reasons.

It ultimately comes down to politics and economics.

Re: Raymond Chandler’s guide to street, hoodlum, and prison lingo

#40

Post by fenomas »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #27
bedobi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ideas of quality and correctness are important Quality and correctness are important! And AAVE does have and enforce both. If you answered a question like "where be the car?" with "it be on the road" or "it's on the road" when in fact it be in the garage, you would be grammatically incorrect. I bet you have no idea what habitual be even is or how it works. (I didn't) And it all begs the question, why, in the US, is…

It’s considered incorrect because the combined cultural output of the previous five centuries established an educated baseline as to what is considered proper. It’s not simply an arbitrary designation or a consequence of “privilege” and culture isn’t just an empty variable that is selected randomly. The point about Australian English is irrelevant. Australian English is correct in Australia and incorrect in America,…

This seems like a very strange position to take.

For one, I think what you're attacking here is usually called "descriptivism", as opposed to prescriptivism. Relativism is already a term of art in linguistics for something unrelated.

For two, it's hard to follow what point you're trying to make. If you think Australian English is correct in Australia, why not similarly say that AAVE is correct in a place where people speak it? Do Australians make up a "culture" in some way that people who speak AAVE don't?

Post reply on HN