Slang Attitude Quotes

I never know which Starr I should be. I can use some slang, but not too much slang, some attitude, but not too much attitude, so I’m not a 'sassy black girl.' I have to watch what I say and how I say it, but I can’t sound 'white.

May we never again read about Dark Ages peasants eating tomatoes; unbelievably plucky/feisty liberated medieval heroines with names like Dominique; 18th-century travelers crossing Europe or the Atlantic in a week; slang that's sixty years ahead of its time and many, many other such common anachronisms of fact and attitude...

A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax. New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be.

I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. 'This was my country and it might be yet,' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: 'But something came between it and the sun.' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all—and Perón had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library—but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. 'A canfinfla, you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a 'cunter."' Had not the very tango itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)

Not for Fun, Why so Hilarious? [Part 3] If someone wants you to be bad, you have every right to make him feel bad; If someone wants you to bend, you have every right to make him to take you a bow; If someone wants to lock you, you have every right to keep his key with you; If someone wants to shout at you, you have every right to slip your tongue with him; If someone wants to disbelief you, you have every right to cheat him; If someone wants to blop you, you have every right to make him clap for you; If someone wants to know your potent, you have every right to make him impotent; If someone wants to slap you, you have every right to make his mind block; If someone wants to make you weak, you have every right to pull him down; If someone wants to point at you, you have every right to cut his tail; If someone wants to define you, you have every right to refine him; If someone wants to enmity you, you have every right to make him die for you; If someone wants to threaten you, you have every right to disclose his secrets; If someone wants to play with your bad time, you have every right to make him as your comedy time; If someone wants to scold you, you have every right to talk with him in your mother slang; If someone wants to see your downfall, you have every right to fuck him off; If someone wants to kill you, you have every right to fix his funeral; Afterall, our life is full of air with a body full of hair …. !!! ‘Indian Shakespeare

At the time, many female colleagues congratulated me for withstanding Barney’s withering attitude and outing what we’d now describe as a flagrant celebrity love cheat. Today, though, the ‘great’ New Order runaround fiasco of 1986 seems howlingly naive, a joyless and ill-judged one-note harrumph both on stars who refused to Play The Game and a desire to prove Barney Sumner a bounder – hardly for cheating on his wife (who I did not know existed) but for failing to turn up to a Smash Hits interview with an arsenal of hilarious jokes. We were always scuppered, anyway, with the realities of rock ’n’ roll: to protect the youngest viewers, the majority of references to wimmin, booze ’n’ drugs were merely skipped around in a riotous twinkle of euphemism, slang and innuendo, all ‘rock ’n’ roll mouthwash’, ‘foxtrels’ and ‘mazin’ rumpo … speryoooo!’ In

Human nature is a constant – except when it isn’t. In the future society, consciousness, the way in which people understand themselves to be people, might be very different. On the one hand, we might say that people have always fallen in love, made art, worshipped gods, fought wars and engaged in complex forms of political organisation and conflict. But our understanding of ourselves as human subjects today is profoundly different from medieval times, which, again, is profoundly different from Ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt; which, again, is profoundly different from Neolithic times… anyway, the point is, in the future, people might not share our values. Your vision of the future should reflect this and not simply reflect modern attitudes in different clothes. 6: Language shapes reality. Language changes over time. New words are coined, others fall out of use. Social and technological changes produce changes in the lexicon; styles of speaking and writing evolve, what was ‘normal’ in the eighteenth century seems obscure today – your future should reflect this, with new words, new slang, new expressions and colloquialisms, new ways of speaking and articulating. China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011) is a good example of how to do this. Building a new, tangible reality out of language will give your vision of the future a density, credibility and coherence that goes beyond the practical mechanics of story, plot and structure. Finally, be bold – the future is yours to imagine.