Originally published at: Get hip to teenage antics and terms with this handy guide - Boing Boing
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not sure that one isn’t better off guessing from the original ‘defined’ term:
“hot cat : a gator, alligator, swing enthusiast, jiver, jivester, swinger, wiggle worm, platterburg”
in passing, can’t resist pointing out that “Maynard G. Krebs” was the model for Scooby Doo’s one and only “Shaggy”, right down to the chin-beard:
(that is, the property is so aged that Shaggy was more ‘beatnik’ than ‘hippy’)
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Mildly surprised to learn there was never a Gilligan’s Island crossover with Scooby Doo. I thought everyone who was ever on TV in the 70s or 80s got in on that action.
Perhaps it was because the cartoonified version of the castaways were stranded on another planet in the early 80s.
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I would never have guessed that one. Sylvester usually took his losses in stride.
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Many many years ago I called Pussycat at her job and could hear the other tattoo guys talking about me before she picked up the phone. “Who’s that?” “It’s her boyfriend, that stupid Dobie Gillis looking motherfucker.” I was incensed. When she answered I said “You tell that idiot it’s stupid Maynard looking motherfucker, Dobie was the fucking jock!”
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I hope that the book doesn’t contain the one truly filthy profanity uttered by Maynard G Krebs on the show: “Work?!”
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That skewered my jangles; you popping me, daddy?
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I love Dobie Gillis. It was such a great show, and Maynard G. Krebs was perfect. Fun fact: the reunion tv movie they made for Dobie Gillis in the 80s, Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis, is based on the Friedrich Durrenmatt play, the Visit.
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I have to wonder how much made-up slang ended up getting adopted by young people and thereby becoming real. And I wonder how much more influential their slang was than the real thing - after all, a nationally broadcasted television program had a lot more reach than the actual Beatnik subculture in shaping popular slang. (It seems like routinely the collective tv/movie depictions of various subcultures become the popular understanding of what they look/sound like, even when they don’t in reality, at all.)
I’m finding a lot of it self-evident, and I’m wondering how much of that is because the slang successfully permeated the culture (and also how much originated in the show).
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I don’t know about this slang, but what ended up becoming stereotypical valley girl slang was almost entirely made up by Moon Unit Zappa.
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It’s always interesting to me to see unknown-to-me jargon defined using other unknown-to-me jargon.
‘What’s a shlootyboop? Why, a shlootyboop is when you fraznozzle with four or more glops.’ Then it’s just a rabbithole of exponential branches.
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When
was released, either movie theatres handed out similar dictionary leaflets or papers had a supplement or something. I forget the details and can’t check right now.
Anyway, so far I couldn’t find the full text, only references to it.
https://greensdictofslang.com/sources/517
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I was dismayed to learn that Casey Kasem, who voiced Shaggy, modeled his voice on Walter Denton, the teen with the squeaky voice on Our Miss Brooks. which does explain the high pitch of Shaggy. but it seems obvious that the writers and animators modeled everything else on Krebs.
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It’s called the Annie Hall effect. To make a trend obvious on TV/Movie you have to exaggerate, then the exaggeration becomes the new standard.
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It’s a miracle, a genuine Hollywood miracle, that Richard Crenna ever managed to transcend that role, and that Hollywood somehow allowed him to.
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Yeah, there is also that on top of the fact that, previous to the web, you had subcultures that tv/movie writers had little to no familiarity with and no easy way to research them (and they knew the mass audience had no familiarity with them either), so they were just making things up.
And of course this pre-dates the motion picture - there are so many books involving references to (sub)cultures that modern audiences are far more familiar with than the writer was at the time, which are now completely laughable, even though we still might be feeling the cultural influence of those books in misrepresenting those cultures. (And in the most extreme cases you even have those cultures trying to recreate themselves based on the ignorant misrepresentations of authors whose depictions became the popular conceptions.)
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