Street Talk
Hanging around a warehouse can really broaden your horizons. I work with a lot of guys, of all ages, and a few women, too. The women tend to be a little more masculine than I’m accustomed to being around, but hey, that’s the way it is.
Sometimes I hear words or phrases that are completely new to me. I am the first to admit that I don’t hand out on downtown street corners to keep up with the street talk. Usually if you can hear the whole conversation you can figure out what they are saying just from the context of the convo and the inflection in their voice. Sometimes I have no clue.
There is a website that helps with this, called Urban Dictionary. It’s a user contributed website, a little like the Wikipedia idea, where they throw up a word or a phrase and the users write in with the definition plus use it in a sentence or two to help clarify the meaning. I like the way they have a “word of the day” so you can stay on top of the newest slang. Or you can search for a word by spelling it out - if you can figure that out - or by just using the first couple of letters to search through all the entries. When you search by letter you come across some interesting side trips for words you never heard of before.
I’m amazed to find that people actually talk like this every day - they must all live in L. A. or Detroit or someplace very urban. Because I can tell you, I’m around high school and college age kids all the time and I don’t hear half this stuff used around here, and a lot of it would get my face slapped if I tried to work it into my own conversations at home.