Culturebox: That's So Mysto

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the good word That's So Mysto What makes slang stick? By Juliet Lapidos Posted Thursday, Aug. 18, 2011, at 7:37 AM ET Feeling nostalgic for a journalistic era I never experienced, I recently read Tom Wolfe's 1968 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I'd been warned that the New Journalists slathered their prose with slang, so I wasn't shocked to find nonstandard English on nearly every line: dig, trippy, groovy, grok, heads, hip, mysto and, of course, cool. This psychedelic time capsule led me to wonder about the relative stickiness of all these words--the omnipresence of cool versus the datedness of groovy and the dweeb cachet of grok, a Robert Heinlein coinage from Stranger in a Strange Land literally signifying to drink but implying profound understanding. Mysto, an abbreviation for mystical, seems to have fallen into disuse. It doesn't even have an Urban Dictionary entry. There's no grand unified theory for why some slang terms live and others die. In fact, it's even worse than that: The very definition of slang is tenuous and clunky. Writing for the journal American Speech, Bethany Dumas and Jonathan Lighter argued in 1978 that slang must meet at least two of the following criteria: It lowers "the dignity of formal or serious speech or writing," it implies that the user is savvy (he knows what the word means, and knows people who know what it means), it sounds taboo in ordinary discourse (as in with adults or your superiors), and it replaces a conventional synonym. This characterization seems to open the door to words that most would not recognize as slang, including like in the quotative sense: "I was like ... and he was like." It replaces a conventional synonym (said), and certainly lowers seriousness, but is probably better categorized as a tic. To continue reading, click here. Juliet Lapidos is a Slate associate editor. Follow her on Twitter. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Ron Paul Does It. Rick Perry Does It. The GOP Craze for Fed-Bashing. Why Does the Chinese Edition of My Book About Science Have Sexy Ladies on It? Is There Any Way To Save the Postal Service?	Advertisement
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