Back in the years of middle school, I had a final oral presentation that essentially dictated whether or not I moved onto the high school English class that I wanted. The only real guideline for the speech was that I teach about what I was passionate about. So partially as a small desperate preteen attempt to be “different” and partially because of the majority of my movie and music tastes at the time, I chose to write a passion speech about the 1990s.

The fact that I didn’t actually grow up in the 90s however proved to be challenging in terms of content, so I had to go off of the knowledge I gained from my nights of cheesy feel good movies on heartbroken Thursdays and preach about shit like Pablo Honey and how it was actually one of the most underrated albums ever.

Anyway, before I even knew what linguistics was, I picked up on some pretty cool things from watching some of my favorite movies, like how popular language, or “slang”, was so much different circa 1998 compared to the late 00s.

One of my favorite films like… ever, ended up being quintessence of mid 90s language.

Clueless fans eat your heart out. Here is a list of famous quotes and terminology from the movie. I thought it was kind of fun to think about the equivalents we have nowadays for what the words meant back then.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/19/clueless-glossary-buggin-cake-boy-more-90-s-slang-from-the-film.html

An eloquent demonstration and the language in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf7MT1p1VNI

Here’s just a general example of 90s slang, too, if the whole valley girl thing doesn’t suffice.

http://www.theawl.com/2012/05/express-street-verbage

In lieu of this assignment, I thought maybe it’d be a good idea to date back a little further; what was slang like in the 80s? The internet did not disappoint.

http://www.liketotally80s.com/2009/05/80s-slang/

“Bag your face.” Priceless.

The movie “Heathers” also has some hilarious execution of popular language in the late 80s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LkFNZauk90

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2AxfjxwFxw (probably NSFW)

Now, veering away from slang in a decade type setting, I thought it might be cool to consider how slang differs (kind of how we learned earlier in the semester) by region… and what I came most frequently across was British vs American slang. So here’s that.

Some of this stuff is cringe worthy by the way, so brace yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XxnlQEDgVI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmHcJnd5j9U

Australian vs American Challenge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMLQ9V-2f3A

General Australian Slang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcAIr2-tCeg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqM64TCr6pU