In the spirit of monumental events, I ask you to take a moment to share your nachas with two slang words that are now also approaching new stages of life.
Schwa!
The younger of the two — schwa — I first spotted in an online newspaper article celebrating the release of UCLA Slang 6, the UCLA Linguistics Department's most recent attempt to keep us in the know about college neology. "Schwa! Popular slang dictionary marks 20th anniversary at UCLA," the article was titled.
I was somewhat surprised to see the word accompanied by an exclamation point. I admit, it does have an acoustic appeal to it — an "eargasm," some UCLA-ers might even call it — but the schwa, typically known as the upside-down lower case e symbol that connotes the vowel sound in "duh" (), doesn't usually solicit much excitement from journalists.
Apparently, I've been in Britain too long because, explains "Slang," schwa now means something more along the lines of "wow!" Or at least in Westwood, Calif. it does.
The word, in its strictly dictionary-definition sense (that is, the neutral vowel sound or the phonetic symbol for it), comes, through German, from the Hebrew word meaning "neutral vowel," pronounced "shvah." According to Pamela Munro, UCLA Professor of Linguistics and editor of "Slang," though, the slang version seems to have appeared out of nowhere.
As words don't generally create themselves, I checked with the trusty slang aficionados of UrbanDictionary.com, and if the word's origin is hard to pinpoint, its versatile definition certainly doesn't make the search much easier.
The first of the website's of 14 definitions characterizes schwa as only vaguely similar to UCLA's definition. The rest, however, claim schwa as a synonym for just about everything from "marijuana" to "sexual activity" to "a female that has lost her virginity to a transvestite" to the one I challenge you to popularize: "paint that flakes off cheap plastic beads and is used for psychological testing, similar to inkblot tests."
FAIL
The second word I would like to recognize collectively is one that's already grown popular among college and non-college crowds, both East and West: "fail" (or, as it sometimes appears, "EPIC FAIL").
Most commonly an interjection, "fail" is the succinct yet expressive mot juste for a schadenfreude-inducing situation arising from another's stupidity or negligence.
Perhaps the word's essence is best captured by Failblog.org, the Internet meme that is at once proof and cause of the word's virality. A picture of a bar of soap shaped like Texas but labeled "New Mexico Soap," for example, was posted to Failblog as a "Soap Fail," while a sign that advertised child photography using the slogan "we will shoot your kids" was a "Wording Fail." Of the more visual variety, a building complex in the aerial-view shape of a swastika was deemed a "FEIL!"
Now middle-aged, fail is out of the limelight, making way for the schwas of the day. About a year ago, the New York Times language columnist Ben Zimmer gave the word the montage it deserved and helped fail find its roots. As an interjection, he wrote, fail most likely rose to celebrity status after the 1990s Japanese videogame Blazing Star's choppy-English fail-screen, "You fail it!" (In full: "You fail it! Your skill is not enough, see you next time, bye-bye!")
In a bit of a fail moment of Zimmer's own, though, one feisty commenter pointed out that the columnist failed to acknowledge fail's popularity among techies beginning in the '80s thanks to the pre-Windows DOS operating system's ambiguous error screen, "Abort, Retry, Fail?"
Why neither of them proposed the possibility that the fail trend originated with the big, fat, red F-mark on the age-old paper or exam beats me. To that, all I can say is schwa! (In the bead-paint sense, of course.)
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Romy Oltuski is a rising senior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
