Monday, November 22, 2010

Taking the hype



Karen, a woman I know from Pure Dance Company, has been trying to coin a new slang term. Slang can be tricky: it has to be amusing, maybe a little subversive, fun to say, broadly applicable and, most difficult, it has to capture the Zeitgeist of a subculture in some way.

I thought hers fulfilled all of these requirements, so I submitted it to Urban Dictionary, the 13th century Catholic monks of slang.

Here is the submission:
to take the hype: to take a short cut, easier way or the most direct route; to travel the shortest distance between two points; derived from calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle, a shorter line than the combination of the other two sides.

Example: I'm so hungry, but I'm too tired to cook dinner. Let's take the hype and order in.
Urban Dictionary rejected it. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to make this happen.

One could say I'm taking the hype to create new slang, rather than allowing it to develop naturally.

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