The Life and Death of American Slang, Part I: Shade and Twerk

When does slang die? Is it when your mom sends you a link to a TIME.com definition of “bae”? When “shade” becomes a Jeopardy question? When “selfie” beats “twerk” for word of the year? These words have become so removed from their original contexts that the begin to lose their meaning, or at least some of their value. After all, isn’t one of the primary functions of slang to identify the speaker as a member of the community? I don’t care how many episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race your cool mom has seen, she does not throw shade in quite the way the queens of Paris is Burning do.

Shakespeare, God, Popeye

“I am not what I am.” Wait, what? No Fear Shakespeare—the Sparknotes guide that translates Shakespeare into “the kind of English people actually speak today”—graciously glosses this as “I am not what I appear to be,” but he doesn’t really say that does he? No, he doesn’t; he says he is not who he is. This is not a question of weird/scary Elizabethan English.