Have you ever made up your own slang word? Slang has to start somewhere, so if you and your friends start a new term, there’s a chance you’ll see it in a movie in a few years, or here on English, baby! We’ve been defining a slang term a week for years and it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of words anytime soon.

But slang terms usually just happen on their own. It’s hard to make one up on purpose. I remember when I was about five years old, my neighbor and I were playing in some mud and decided that we’d call the mud “habla,” a word we thought we made up. But when we told my mom, she informed us that “habla” is the Spanish for “speak.” It’s so hard to think of a word no one’s used before!

In a recent episode of the Sarah Silverman Program, she meets a guy who supposedly invented the term “boo-yah,” and is a celebrity because of it. So Sarah decides to invent her own word. But it’s harder than she thinks. She sings a song about it:

The video has a lot of other slang terms in it like “faceplant,” which is when you fall on your face, “TMI,” which means “too much formation,” and “psych,” which means “just kidding.” There’s also a policeman character who hates the idea of slang because he thinks it’s destroying society.

The word she ends up choosing, “ozay,” which is similar in meaning to “lame,” was actually a word that she and her friends used in high school.  In this behind-the-scenes video, Sarah talks about how she didn’t realize that “ozay” wasn’t used outside of her home town until she moved away.

Have you and your friends ever invented a slang term or tried to? Think you can come up with one right now?

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Tags: english baby, English slang, invent slang, learn english, ozay, sarah silverman

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