Hi! I'm glad to hear from you. However, to avoid possible misunderstandings, I'm just going to throw a few terms out there. Hate to impose extra cognitive load on you, but I'm sure we all use certain slangs and we may or may not know what each other's slangs mean. Plus, this way, you can be in on my inside joke, and what is friendship, really, besides a series of inside jokes?
Also, this serves the purpose of properly citing the sources of all my slang, so that the right people can get credit. Or blame. Your call.
So if I say, for example, "Is it The Best?" (or Worst, or Biggest, or Smallest, or whatever) that's an Alex Grubbism. It's meant mostly facetiously, as in when Will would say something was good and Grubb would respond with "But is it... The Best?" just to antagonize him. Hopefully you can catch when I'm capitalizing The Best in conversation.
On the topic of Alex Grubb, "Why would anyone do that?" is another rhetorical question. I probably agree that what you're doing has merit. It's a sort of sarcastic throwaway.
I picked up saying "great" from Will. It might sound sarcastic, but it actually means something is great. For example, seeing Live at the Pittsburgh Pirates game is great.
This is not to be confused with writing "GREAT" or "AWESOME" in capital letters, which I picked up from Ram. Same idea- it actually means something is very good. But it carries more of a connotation of very genuine excitement, whereas saying "great" a la Will is just acknowledging something great.
XOXO is another one I've stolen from Ram, although not actually used much. It's a signoff on an email, as in "XOXO Ram." Though I don't use it much, I do appreciate it. I think the reason I haven't stolen more slang from Ram is that it's all very genuine, and I think copying it would make it lose some of its sincerity.
Back to AWESOME, though. "AWESOME" is also a nice segue into Brian Gadomski slang that I have picked up. For those of you who don't know him, Brian is a friend from high school. He is also a juggler, which is how I got to know him, although that's not true, because I actually got to know him because he is the brother of Pete Gadomski, one of my best friends from high school. A long time ago, he made a short film, like a minute long, about a kid who's just wandering around. Then he meets a friend who says "what are you doing?" "eh, nothing." And then they jump into the air and the screen goes "AWESOME!" all 60's-like or something. The Go! Team is on in the background. It wasn't a great film. But I do mean "AWESOME!" in that sense sometimes.
Other Brian Gadomski slang I've adopted:
"Book" = "cool"
"Choin" = "cool" but you're a loser if you say "choin", so I try not to say it.
"Bru" = "bro" except it's so much cooler than saying "bro".
Oh, and "It could be worse." I've been big on this one recently. It's a two-person line, really. The idea is like this: someone complains about something ("Man, the weather's bad today"). Person A says "It could be worse." Person B thinks up an extreme outlandish way in which it sure could be worse. ("Yeah, it could be raining hot molasses!")
"Fresh" has been kept alive in my memory by Brian, but it really started with Erik, another one of my best friends from high school. It means what it meant back in 1992: good. I should point out that a lot of the slang I picked up from Erik (which is a lot!) came from Magic: the Gathering players. I think the only other one I use is "What a hopping" = "Man, that's rough."
And then there's the catch phrases I've picked up from Brian Gray, which might as well be a different language. A recent favorite is "Try this delicious soup, Samuel." "I'm orange!" I offer no explanation.
Err... and then there's the Adam Jaffe catch phrases, which are a different language, and varying degrees of offensive. If I say "er-ver-car-durrs" instead of "avocados", or talk about popping up in your car's backseat with your favorite Chingy CD, or claim that my name is "Wenis McGee", ... well, the only excuse I have is that these things happened in an improv scene.
Hey, the Technical Opportunities Conference is next week, which means recruitment is happening, which means employers might be facebooking me, and then might follow the link to my blog. Or they might just Google me. At any rate, hi recruiters! Not only can I bring my sweet COMPUTING SKILLS to your company, I can also bring to you a whole new generation of slang!
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