Whaazzzaahhp?! It erupted from my niece with as much guttural bass as a five-year-old could muster, accompanied by a grin and a vigorous shake of the head. When asked if she heard that at school, she began hopping around the living room. “Everyone’s saying it!” she said. “The big kids are saying it, the little kids are saying it—everyone!”
This was several years ago (that catchphrase from a beer ad, you might recall, peaked at the millennium), but while reading Leslie Savan’s new book — Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever — I realized that my niece had defined what Savan calls “pop language.” It wasn’t just that “everyone” was saying “Whaazzzaahhp?!”; it was also her exuberance at being part of a large phenomenon, one that involved “the big kids.” That transcendence is a major factor in making a word or phrase go pop, says Savan. Its usage has to spread like wildfire, crossing boundaries of age, class, race, and ethnicity, until even the naysayers are drawn, almost involuntarily, to say it (probably with a slightly contemptuous inflection).
Having been exiled to the island of cast-off catch phrases, “Whaazzzaahhp?!” now dwells with the likes of “Show me the money!” and “Talk to the hand” (one hopes that “Don’t go there” is en route). But, of course, potential popisms are bubbling continuously into the collective consciousness, auditioning for their moment in the spotlight. They have varying life spans, just like celebrities. So, rather than creating a compendium of zeitgeist-y verbiage, one that would become dated faster than The Preppy Handbook, Savan aimed to give her book a longer shelf life (oops) by examining the whys and wherefores of pop language.
The main characteristic that distinguishes pop language from mere slang or jargon is widespread popularity. The corollary: Pop is often slang or jargon that has jumped out of its niche. Savan devotes a sizable chapter to showing how, from “bogus” to “411,” slang that was coined or popularized by African-Americans is “all over mainstream pop talk like white on rice.” Once it ascends to pop status, a phrase can pass through several stages, according to Savan. The crest of its popularity is inevitably “followed by a period of soft ridicule for overuse.” Then there’s the irony stage—people will say it, but only knowingly. After that, if it’s still around, the phrase becomes “like a Raid-resistant roach—and it sheds the irony and begins to seem as indispensable as, say, Do the math or 24/7.” Not all pop language makes it that far, but if it does (consider “awesome”), then it has attained the status of “a thought—or more accurately, a stand-in for a thought.”
Although that might sound like the definition of “cliché,” pop is also distinct from those linguistic shortcuts. The two can overlap, however; “fifteen minutes of fame” is both pop and cliché, Savan says, though as a “senior pop phrase” it has more “jolt” than its cliché siblings (“by the skin of his teeth”). That jolt is essential to pop language—maybe adults don’t hop around when they say “Fuhgedaboudit,” but it does provide a feeling of power, or at least iconoclasm, in the face of dehumanizing cubicle farms, telephone labyrinths, and big-box retailers. It shows that the speaker is in the know, up to speed, down with things.
Not that you have to be down with the history of a given word, even if Savan’s tracing the evolution of various pop terms, including “Yesss!,” makes for some of the most interesting parts of Slam Dunks. In the real world, etymology is for losers. Like, who cares that “fifteen minutes of fame” comes from one of Andy Warhol’s prophecies, or that pearls come from grains of sand? What matters is their lustrous allure, and what they say about you. Except that pop language doesn’t have to say much of anything—which makes it, like pearls, suitable for just about any occasion.
By way of a long but interesting digression into the structure, forms, and rhythms of sitcoms, Savan makes the point that, just as these shows are designed to flatter and excite audiences rather than challenge them, we translate those forms into pop language to flatter and excite each other. She describes pop phrases as “verbal viruses” with the “ability to flash-freeze thought and stun our imaginations with commercial confetti.”
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