For my final paper topic I’m leaning towards how slang words are becoming “real words.” I’ve noticed a lot with myself that I find myself explaining these words to older people who have never even heard of these terms. I’ve also noticed that their are words and slang that I don’t understand because they are from the past and they were never “passed on.” I would hear people older than me using them and I understand how they would feel if they heard todays new words and terms. It’s really interesting to how these terms and words are made and how so many people use them. Some influences are in songs! It’s very common for singers and rappers to say a term or word and next thing you know a lot of people are using it. Another one is social media. I noticed especially on Tiktok as well. I think this is a really interesting topic to discuss. It’s involves past and modern terms and how both have made their way (for some)  into our everyday vocabulary. Also to discuss how social media and people of influence have a huge impact on that as well. I even looked up some slang words and terms and they have made their way into the urban dictionary! As for research I plan on using some videos I found on YouTube, articles, and see if I can find anything in our text that maybe discusses this!

For my final essay I would like to discuss words that have been re-invented, or coined through social media outlets such as Tik-Tok, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I am very interested in words that social media introduces to us that were coined, and how they are now used in everyday language for some people or even as slang. There are many words like “cheugy” and “sheesh” that were not a thing until after the Tik Tok world heard these words and eventually everyone began to use them to describe life or people in general. There are other phrases like “down bad” or even “sneaky link” that originally the two words had their own meanings but together it brings on a whole new meaning altogether.

For this final essay I can use Tik Tok as a platform and other social media platforms to see how people have coined new words and what words have become trendier than other words and even see if the original uses of the words are the same as what these words are being used to say today. I will also be using other sources to see what these words mean to other people and how they are used differently. I can also survey the class and see how they use some of these words and see if it’s different from the original meanings or if some people use them differently altogether.

A major issue I know I will have with this topic is that some words were coined and then became so popular that everyone starts using it immediately and it may be hard to find the original person that coined the word.

For my final paper I want to write about how slang words can become real words and how this has happened in the past. This is a topic I want to explore because I am interested in seeing what words we use in our language today were once slang words. Was the word “slang” itself a slang word at one point? I could even explore how a real word can slowly morph into a slang word; has this happened in the past? I also want to see which slang words we use today will eventually be in our dictionaries years from now. I also want to explore the process of how this happens, is a slang word slang one day and a real word the next? Slang words are definitely part of our English lexicon, there is no question about it; especially popular words that arose from social media. Sometimes people can use slang words without realizing that they’re slang. But since they are part of our English lexicon and are popular amongst social media, could they be turned into real words and should they be? There are many questions I have that I believe will be answered through my research on this topic. I am still not sure what sources I am going to use or where I am going to get them from. One issue I feel like I’m going to have is that I might get off track. I have so many questions on this topic and I feel like I should pick one and explore it thoroughly instead of trying to answer so many. Although, I feel like if I choose to stick with one question I might be able to talk about it less than I expect. To be completely honest, I am still very unsure on where to start but just writing this blog post has given me some sort of clarification on what I want to do.

For my final paper, I wanted to discuss the analysis of word formation in Taylor Swift’s songs. Many artists today use slang words, compound words, and coinage of new words in their songs. Taylor Swift is one of these artists who has many examples in her songs. When writing this paper, I will begin by clearly stating the definitions of slang, compounding, and coinage so the reader will understand. Then, I will show these examples in the written lyrics of her songs. I have already begun analyzing some lyrics and have found a few examples. In her song titled “Welcome to New York” Taylor uses the term aglow. Aglow is another way to say “glowing” or “radiant”, but it is also an old-fashioned slang word. She also uses newer slang, for example in the song titled “…Ready For It?” stating “I see how this is gon’ go”. Gon’ is slang for “go on” or “going to”. I am going to discuss this comparison between newer slang words in her songs and older slang words. I also found an example of compounding in “Welcome to New York” with the word forevermore. It is a combination of the two words “forever” and “more”. Lastly, there is evidence of coinage in her song “End Game” because she uses the term A-team, which is a coined word from the Vietnam War. An issue I feel I might have is not having enough material to write about, but I feel an easy fix to this is to compare the slang Taylor Swift uses in her songs to the slang other artists use in theirs. For example, how Taylor Swift, as well as artists like Ariana Grande etc., use slang like “aye” and “yuh” in their songs.

The topic that I am interested in for my final paper is the everyday use of compound words that result in blending, coinages, and clipped morphemes. For example, the compound word telephone, results in phone which is a clipped version of the compound word. An example of a blending is hangry, hungry, and angry, which can also be considered a coinage, it was just recently added to the English oxford dictionary. I will be discussing the 2 forms of compound words, endocentric and exocentric, how compounding can include derived aspects, but then differentiate them, explain the difference between compounding vs derivation. I will be discussing the different types of compounds such as copulative compounds, synthetic compounds, neoclassical compounds and how we use these in our language and slang as well. I will be talking about how slang can derive from compound words and blending as well as the right hand rule. I plan on using sources such as documentaries on slang, textbooks explaining the different types of compounds, songs that include blendings from compound words. Some issues that I might expect to come up is expanding on the topic, im afraid I will only be able to speak about it so much, that I say everything I need to and it wont be enough to suffice. I have to find a topic within this topic of compounding and im leaning toward the use of slang, but that Is considered more like coinages, not compound words although some compound words are slang such as doughboy.

For my final paper, I was interested on talking about  the idea of how two words are blended to create a new one. These new words are created to set out a new invention or a phenomenon. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to expand this topic more, but an idea is that for each paragraph I can describe each one of these blended words, and explain more about them…maybe with questions like why each word is formed into one, are these words considered grammatical words, does this word actually mean one or the other, like for example the word “hangry” and etc. I was hoping you can give me some ideas as well. What I also found interesting while doing a bit of research on this topic was, there’s another name indicated for blended words, it’s called “portmanteau words”. Portmanteau is a French word which means “suitcase” and the word suitcase is a mixture of two words that are formed in one. Although, I know it would be considered a compound word, in portmanteau there are words like “bromance”…which if you break apart it’s “brother” and “romance”. After reading more about portmanteaus I was very intrigued, because I’ve read that writers use portmanteau to make their writing more interesting and it adds creativity to it. Another interesting fact that I can speak about, is the term portmanteau was devised by Lewis Carroll, which I can expand that into more detail. Before writing down my blog post, one of the worries that I had was not being able to expand the paper with this topic. I do have another topic idea I might want to do, it’s comparing Shakespeare to English. Although I wouldn’t know how I would go about that idea, but it seems interesting to me because the romance words that are involved in Shakespeare. After doing more research, and maybe some helpful tips from you professor, hopefully I can create a great paper.

    We all know that Nicki Minaj is the best female rapper of all time. Therefore, for the final paper I feel inspired to analyze some of her songs. Some people have a hard time understanding her word play in her lyrics. I want to look at her lyrics to find examples of slang, blending, word coining, and clipping. I would define those properties and then inform others of what she is saying. For example, a pattern she frequently goes with is starting off her verse with the word ‘ayo’ which combines aye and yo. I also know in her song ‘Bust down Barbiana’ there is a lot of blending throughout the song to rhyme with ‘barbiana’. My only concern is I’m not sure if my paper will be long enough. If that is the case then I think I also want to mention the fact that many artists including Nicki herself say the phrase “gimme the loot” and where that originates from. I also noticed how Ariana Grande and Doja Cat say ‘yuh’ in their songs a lot. I’m not exactly sure where that word originated but I have a feeling it came from Nicki Minaj as well. My paper is intended to be informative but I also have the urge to make an argument about something at the same time. I think I will be strongly expressing how I believe how Nicki Minaj’s writing paved the way for other artists. I just need to figure out how to organize the essay with certain ideas I mentioned. Otherwise, this paper will be very enjoyable for me to work on. 

For my final paper I was thinking about focusing on words being complex or simplex.  While it is typically easy to determine which of these two terms would be used to describe a particular word, sometimes it’s not so easy.  For this class’s blog post #1 assignment the class was given a set of words (forbid, forget, forgive, forgo, and forswear) and was asked to determine if these words were simplex or if “for” was an affix, meaning that they would be considered complex.  I would like to expand on this idea in my paper because I found this topic and assignment to be particularly intriguing.  When completing this assignment I had initially thought that they would be complex because they all started with the word “for”.  After considering all of the definitions for the given words as well as the definitions of what would be the stems of the words, I noticed that adding “for” to the ‘stems’ didn’t produce a parallel effect on all of them.  Due to this, I wound up leaning towards the words being simplex.  It is interesting to think that viable arguments most definitely can be made for both sides- I guess it just depends on everyone’s personal analysis of the words.  I would like to come up with my own set of words and ask a few sets of people to give their opinions.  If I would be able to survey a group of students and a group of Linguistics professors, I feel as though I would be able to write my paper based on all of the responses, and then expand on that by comparing the results of one group to the results of the other.  I’m curious as to whether or not the responses will show a divide between these two groups of people, seeing as how I feel that the group of professors would be much more familiar with and knowledgeable on this topic.  I could also go even further than that by forming a group of people who are not familiar with linguistics (most people- definitely everyone that I know), showing them excerpts from the textbook which explain the difference, and then asking them to give their opinions on the set of words.  I’m also curious about what those results would be in comparison to the two groups of people which are in the field of Linguistics.  

 

The topic that I am interested in exploring is word formation from multiple artists. I think this topic could be really interesting to dive into deeper to discuss the coinage of words. I figured that finding coined words artists use can go to show how us as listeners become influenced by popular artists and begin to use the words in our daily lives. In my essay, I would include information about word formation and coinage (possibly the origin of coinage, why words are coined, how words are coined, what makes a word coined etc). Going further, I will find artists who have coined terms and popularized them. For example, Eminem had coined the word “Stan,” which I didn’t know until I began to do research. Also, Tupac coined the term “thug life.” These are just two examples of what I would plan to go into deeper in my essay. I may also want to analyze if these coined words depend on the genre of music the artist is associated with. After mentioning their coinage, I think I may do some additional research on the word and how it is used today. It would show the influence it has generationally as well as world wise usage. I’m not too sure what additional research I should incorporate besides word formation, coinage, and the multiple artists and coined words. But, I believe if I have all the appropriate information I can successfully make this essay work. 

For my topic for the final paper, I wanted to explore with slang and how certain slang words were created and how it is being used depending on the different locations. In this case I wanted to explore in slang that is specifically used in NYC and how vast of a difference these words can be depending on the boroughs that may or may not use them.

I didn’t know how exactly this would connect to a topic we had learned. Therefore, I was wondering if I could ask Professor Pentangalo in how I can pinpoint what exact topic this could be compared to. This way, I can have a better understanding on the information I want to study on for this essay.

I was also wondering if I can connect the data I found to societal problems, because I feel it would be just as important to mention this. By explaining this, I believe it would explain how certain slang words in todays time have either changed or have not changed since the time they were created. So far I believe that my essay would be focusing on the creation of new lexical words.

Some sources I am thinking of using is videos that speak about the New York accents and slang. I was also thinking about using some articles that connects the way New York City natives speak depending on the history of New York City. I may even add articles how society had changed the way people speak in New York City and connecting that to how slang is used now in New York City.