90S SLANG STILL ALIVE AND WELL

NEAR THE END OF THE 1990S I WAS—wisely, it turns out—debunking the Y2K Dread that gizmos were incapable of counting 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001…. I was driving a Morgan at the time and we even used it to illustrate my May 1999 R&T article.

 Image by Guy Billout from R&T, May 1999.

This recollection came to mind recently upon reading Jennifer A. Freeman’s “This 1990s Slang is All That and a Bag of Chips,” at the Word Smarts website. She recounts, “The ’90s are back in a big way: Check out a ‘vintage’ fashion seller, and they’ll likely be hawking JNCO jeans and babydoll dresses. But does the slang from the last decade of the 20th century stand the test of time?”

Image from Word Smarts.

Gee, I even recognize this pre-digitial storage device illustrating her article. What follows here are tidbits gleaned from it, plus one more Internet sleuthing. 

As If! Jennifer explains, “Brimming with sarcasm, ‘as if’ is a retort to any sort of preposterous suggestion, as though you’re imagining an alternate reality wherein such a suggestion could actually happen.”

Geez, I could use it reading any daily news. Especially the sarcasm part.

Scrub. This particular term evaded me throughout the 90s (I knew its plural as what hospital workers wear). Jennifer brings me up to date: “A scrub, in ’90s vernacular, is a guy with no money, no job, and no prospects. Though it exploded into mainstream use by way of girl group TLC’s 1999 single ‘No Scrubs,’ the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) ascribes the meaning of ‘a mean insignificant fellow, a person of little account or poor appearance’ as far back as 1598. Take, for example, this usage in Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling: ‘He is an arrant Scrub, I assure you.’”

All That and a Bag of Chips. I’ve never heard this one, but sure like the connotation. Jennifer says, “ ‘All that,’ or the longer ‘all that and a bag of chips,’ can be used as either a compliment or more sarcastically toward the subject in question (e.g., ‘She thinks she’s all that’). It evolved out of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and simply means something is great or particularly impressive or attractive. The OED traces early usage of ‘all that’ to 1989, and the full ‘all that and a bag of chips’ to a 1994 issue of People.

Others. Jennifer also offers Booyah! (for a “level of excitement you can’t articulate any other way”), Da Bomb (“a success, especially in entertainment”), and Getting Jiggy (“ ‘jiggy’ was already in popular slang usage prior to the song, with the OED noting its use as an adjective meaning ‘attractive, stylish, or wonderful’ in 1996, such as in this entry in Source magazine: ‘Bikinis, barbecues, beaches, and jiggy honeys are the order of the day.’ ”

I’m hep to that.

Mental Floss. Keith Johnston offers “25 Excellent 1990s Slang Terms,” at Mental Floss, February 9, 2024. Here are several of Keith’s list (which also includes Jiggy and Boo-yah):

Majorly. Keith says, “The OED finds examples of the slang use of majorly in the ’80s, but it was in the ’90s that majorly got majorly big. Consider, once again, Clueless. Based on Jane Austen’s Emma, the story’s key dramatic moment is the heroine’s realization that she is in love. ‘It darted through her with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!’ writes Austen. How does Cher express this sentiment in Clueless ? ‘I’m majorly, totally, butt-crazy in love with Josh!’ ”

Metrosexual. Keith writes, “This portmanteau for a stylish urbanite was coined by Mark Simpson in a 1994 essay. ‘One sharply dressed ‘metrosexual’ in his early 20s … has a perfect complexion and precisely gelled hair, and is inspecting a display of costly aftershaves,’ Simpson wrote. His list of metrosexual must-haves paints a picture of the ’90s male: Davidoff aftershave, Paul Smith jackets, corduroy shirts, chinos, and Calvin Klein underwear.” 

Hmm…. Several decades earlier, I was Old Spice, button-down-collar-with-the-back-tab shirt, corduroy pants, desert boots, and Fruit-of-the-Loom. Did this make me a Paleosexual?

Talk to the Hand. “According to the OED,” Keith recounts, “this phrase can be used ‘to express dismissive disregard of, or indifference to, what a person has said or is saying’ or ‘to implore a person to stop speaking.’ It apparently first popped up as slang at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and as the OED notes, is ‘typically uttered with a hand outstretched and the palm facing the person addressed.’ You can also say ‘talk to the hand, ’cause the face don’t understand.’ ”

Daughter Suz says, “… ‘cause the face ain’t listening.” 

NOOB. “No list of ’90s slang,” Keith writes, “would be complete without one from the then-newfangled commercial internet. This term for a beginner made its first appearance in 1995, in a Usenet forum devoted to the band Phish. If you didn’t know what ASL stood for on ICQ, you were likely a noob.”

I’ve seen it spelled “noobie.” Daughter Suz says writing it with zeros—“n00b”—is hep.  

Well, she doesn’t actually say “hep.” “Hep” is my generation. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024.