American Slang (Part 2)

Mohamed El Hassan Abou El Fadel

Morocco World News

Inezgane, Morocco, July 23, 2013

American Slang (Part 1)

I am getting back to you again in “American Slang II” to shed more light on slang words and expressions you may come across.

This time round, I will start with “Que pasa?” as it may be a good need creation device. This is as you may guess right is of Spanish origin and simply means “What is going on?” or “What is happening?”.

Now at the gitgo of this piece of writing, you may find the word a bit strange. Definitely, it is yet another slang word of black origin and simply means the beginning. “From the gitgo, I told that won’t work.” Now if someone is too much of a loud mouth you may hear somebody telling him: “Now, give it a rest!” or “Buckle it!” The it there refers to the mouth so the counterpart to these two expressions would be “Keep quiet!”.

You may equally encounter some boring or unpleasant person and you may have to “give him the gate” How is that? Well, I suppose you know the expression “to give someone the cold shoulder.” That is to ignore someone but when it comes to “giving someone the gate” the meaning would be to rid yourself of him altogether. You may also wish to end a long discussion about something.

The following exclamation is then used “Period!” meaning that’s it, no more discussion about that whatever that may happen to be. The gitgo word is of black origin as I have mentioned earlier, another word of the same origin is “Calendar” as in “Another calendar and we’ll get our money” So what’s your guess concerning calendar? Yes, it means a month your guess is right!

Some slang words or expressions were coined by computer freaks. Glitch is one such word. There is a glitch in my computer program. The word is used to refer to a technical problem, defect or bug. Glitz is yet another word to get to know it is related to the flashiness and glamour as in, “It’s a lot of glitz but little substance!”

Now if you happen to have a lot of smarts everything you do is going to be a piece of cake. I think plenty of people (Non-American people) would be familiar with the word smarts as it is used a lot. The word means intelligence and if you are particularly intelligent a lot of things you do would seem like a piece of cake: very easy.

Before I conclude, I wish yet to introduce another word but this time from California. It is written as a single word but it can be conceived as a phrase. Seeyabye! As in “Okay, I gotta go now, seeyabye!” This is quite an easy guess, I think. Upon this, I wish to call it stop and tell all of you: “Seeyabye!”