Languages in LA

I notice that people here in L.A. say “nice” when they mean… well… I’m not exactly sure what they mean. It’s a stand-alone response. I say something that is perhaps not quite what was expected, and the reaction is a blink, a pause, and “Nice.” I can’t tell yet if it means “I don’t believe you just said that,” or “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” or what.

For example: I am buying a red velvet footstool from a fine (sounding) young man who advertised it on craigslist for a very reasonable price. It’s beautiful, a glowing ruby red, not worn at all, just perfect for my cats.

Try to understand: everything I do, I do for them. I’m a cat lady. When I look at apartments to rent, I’m looking for wide windowsills for my cats to lie on, a backyard for my cats to sun in, closets for my cats to hide in, long wooden-floored hallways for my cats to run and slide on.

And when I hunt for furniture, I’m looking for something cheap enough that, when my cats shred it with their little ivory claws (and they will) I won’t have a coronary. I also look for little beds for them to rest on, baskets for them to curl up in, end tables for them to sit and squint upon.

So when I saw this footstool, I was enthusiastic. I called the young man and we set up a meeting. He assured me that this was a fine footstool, bought at a fashionable boutique, barely used. I said, “Wonderful! I’m buying it for my cats to lie on.”

Pause. “Nice,” he said dryly.

Now I’m paranoid. I think that “nice,” a perfectly good word that fell into disfavor back in the 1980s, has now fallen even further. Now it’s what you say when you find out that your taste in designer footstools is cat fodder.

I love how readily English makes nouns into verbs. Living in Hollywood is fun because of all the actors, and here, “I Googled him” is replaced by “I IMDB’ed him.” On imdb.com you can find everyone in the film industry, including the assistant to the camera man on a movie that went straight to DVD.

I have a plethora of actor sightings from my three years here. Once I was in line at the grocery store and David Carradine was in front of me. He has a faded eagle tattoo on his wrist. I met Lindsay Lohen at Chateau Marmont. She was sober, very sweet and polite, and I’m always a little sad now when I see … you know. Christian Bale and Keanu Reeves are both taller than I expected. Kirsten Dunst is shorter.

Actually, you have to watch what you say. I was at a restaurant and Orlando Bloom’s name came up. I was in the middle of a snarky comment about his masulinity when my companion’s frantic gestures made me aware that he was sitting right behind me. Hope he didn’t hear me.

But more interesting is meeting handsome actors I’ve never heard of before. I met one fellow at a restaurant, went home and IMDB’ed him, found that he was an East Coast Sagittarius, and that he played a waiter in a great movie from ten years ago. In the movie, someone bumps into him, and he says, “Excuse me”. So it was a speaking role!

I’m also friends with the guy who played the father of the lead who played the love interest of an actress who later starred with Diane Keaton. So there are now four degrees of separation between me and Diane Keaton. Unfortunately, I can’t stand her. But I won’t say it aloud in a restaurant around here.

I can’t remember life before the internet, and of all the sites, craigslist.org is my favorite. There are craigslists for most of the major cities in the US, but I was unaware of it till I moved to L.A. You can find yard sales, used goods, apartments for rent, sales jobs, writing gigs, and kinky sex - all on craigslist.

Particularly, I love apartment hunting, even though I have no intention of moving for another couple years. There’s just something enthralling about running these searches for apartments. Sometimes I even go look at the locations physically, to get a feel for what property managers mean in their descriptions, and I’ve noticed a few euphemisms that crop up regularly.

The first phrase to beware of is “conveniently located”. This is a positive spin on the fact that the unit is a block away from the Viper Room, where drunks will pee under your window as they stagger back to their cars and undertake an evening of vehicular homicide. If you are “conveniently located” near Mann’s Chinese Theater, you are living on the ramp to the 101. Your life will devolve into a blur of tourists, homeless opportunists, and semi trucks that seem to be rumbling through your living room.

Another buzzphrase is “pets welcome!”. This means the place is a wreck and no one is even fighting it anymore. That’s bad. I want a place where I have to wrangle and bribe to get my cats in. I don’t want another yard that is mostly bald patches and dog poop, with suspicious smells in the hallways.

Finally, and I don’t know why this is, but “clean” seems to mean “small, cheap, and ugly.” It just does. Every time.

My next goal is to find out what “quiet” means. I mean… what it really means.

When I grew up in Michigan, we drank pop. Whether it was Pepsi, Coke, or 7-Up, it was pop, as in “Wanna pop?” Soda was a difficult transition for me when I left Michigan 22 years ago. But my little sister, who has recently joined me in L.A., had already begun transitioning from pop to soda some years ago. I wondered, why would a Michigander - still in Michigan - start calling it soda?

I’m a denizen of a political website, and we have our own lingo. I was reading a story online this morning about the rising rate of violent crime in London, titled “Britons Fear Rise of the Yob.” Of course, we all began asking the same question: what’s a yob? British lurkers came out of the woodwork to tell us: it’s a young thug.

“Ah,” we said, “a yute”. This is our term for young thug. It stems from a cynical awareness that newspaper stories written by those with secret sympathies for the perceived underdog have a tendency to characterize marauding vandals as “disadvantaged youth” (now imagine some hairy, smirking thug telling a police officer in a heavy Brooklyn accent, “It ain’t my fawlt officuh, I’ma disadvantaged yute.”).

But such lingo as “yute” is specific to my online community. It’s not geographical. I am wondering if soon geographical linguistic communities will be, if not replaced, at least matched by cyber linguistic communities. I certainly talk more to my online fellow denizens than I do to the neighbors. After all, neighbors move. Online is often more stable. And my little sister is a true MySpace freak. Is that where she picked up soda?

The day may be coming when, rather than hear an accent and ask “Where are you from?” we might hear a word and wonder, “what’s your URL?”.

“I can’t party; my camera’s broken!”

Partying in L.A. absolutely requires a digital camera nowadays. As far as I can tell, young people here do not party for the fun of it anymore. They party so they can take numerous pictures of themselves and their drunken friends. They then stagger home and, still tanked, download the photos so they can update their MySpace page.

This is the new essential partying: that which requires voyeurs to make the experience complete. It’s not enough to have fun. Others, unknown but surely envious, must be imagined perusing your debauchery the next morning. What fun is it to dance on the table at some Weho club, or drunkenly lose your bikini top in the swimming pool at the Standard, if you cannot pretend to be embarrassed tomorrow when the pictures hit your best friend’s MySpace page, and you’re the Britney Spears of your little set?

In the spirit of reciprocity, remember that you must also upload pictures of your best girlfriends having a riproaring good time. Pictures of them kissing strange men are okay, but pictures of them kissing each other are far more desirable for the fascinated onlookers who must surely come to stare on the morrow.

But that’s not all. Photos require captions, and you mustn’t be too articulate or they’ll know that really, you’re a dweeb.

Yo! mo hos!!
U wan2B me!
Me & my homegurl

Los Angeles feeds on celebrity, and celebrities need scandal. But with MySpace and a digital camera, you too can be scandalous. You can be the object of interest. U Can B a MySpace star. And if your friend uploads a truly unflattering picture of you, remember: It’s not Bitch!! anymore. It’s biatch!!

Florence King, the curmudgeonly writer for National Review, once commented that in her youth, Episcopalians were nicknamed Piscops. I have heard that Irish Catholics and Protestants refer to each other, not very affectionately, as Papists and Proddies. And if you are Jewish, of course, you’ve heard it all. The latest demonizing label is Zionist.

It is evident that religious groups often garner nicknames, particularly those groups we have to endure on a daily basis.

So WHY is there no nickname (that I’ve heard) for Scientologists? If ever there was a group just aching for a nickname, by L.Ron it’s them. I live right next to their Mecca: the Celebrity Center in Hollywood. I see them every day. In my building, we gather at the windows like cats and watch them sprint around the block in their various uniforms: white shirts, black bottoms for dress, blue for heavier labor.

Scientologists are not low profile in Hollywood, particularly during their yearly shindig, wherein they hammer, trundle, and construct for weeks before they decimate the parking situation to have their big, loud hoedown. By the time it’s over, the whole neighborhood is foaming at the mouth. So why do we have no nicknames for them?

Perhaps it’s because they’re pretty nice one on one, from what I’ve seen. They never try to recruit us neighbors (possibly able to tell at a glance that we’re broke.) They keep their grounds looking excellent, so the neighborhood stays fairly pretty. And Kenny, the security guard, has helped me look for many a missing cat. He’s nice. I like Kenny. I’ll miss him when the Mother Ship comes to take him away. Meanwhile, however, I’ll be working on a nickname for them. Cruisers? Thetanists? Ooo, I like Thetanists. It sounds like Satanist with a lisp. Perfect.

Lingo is important in Hollywood. I’m an outsider, but I have ventured into the waters a few times here, and it’s soon evident that if you speak the lingo, you can slip right onto a movie set with no one the wiser.

For anyone wishing to crash the set of a movie, I offer the following suggestions.

1) The quickest way to participate is to be an extra. They have to hire union extras up to a point, then they can hire non-union. Most non-unions register with Central Casting, which is supposed to help you get jobs. In reality, however, they are mostly useful for giving you a veneer of movieland respectability. Therefore, register with them, but do your own research. When you find the set you want to crash, be ready to say “Non-union, but registered with Central Casting.”

Say it fast: “Nonunionbutregisteredwithcentralcasting”. Practice that.

2) The place to find on set is basecamp. Yes, very pretentious. Nevertheless, two things you want to be able to ask someone who has a walkie-talkie are “Where do the extras wait?” and “Where’s basecamp?” The portable bathrooms are at basecamp, so you’ll want to know, see.

3) Finally, remember that Hollywood takes itself quite seriously. One must not wander into the tent where the extras are corralled and confess “I thought it would be fun to see if I could be in a movie.” They’ll call security on you. But if you say brightly, “I’m a spec”, suddenly, it’s okay! You are speculating on work. They look at their list of possible extra positions and ask if you are union. Remember your answer? Good.

They always say that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. But Hollywood is really more like a sulky lover: It’s not what you said. It’s how you said it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in the Valley, they speak strangely. Valleygirl-speak has been a joke, or a reference point, since the 1980s. Now comes a comedian named Liam Sullivan, with his alter-ego, Kelly. Kelly is an internet phenomenon who is catching on the way weird things do, like the lip-synching Numa-Numa guy from a few years ago, who brought to the national consciousness the astonishing revelation that there is any such thing as a Moldovan pop song.

Kelly (Liam in glasses and a blond wig, looking like the female version of Garth in Wayne’s world) is a Valley girl whose upper vowels have dropped, and whose lower vowels have palatized until they’ve nearly switched places. She’s a shallow, staring, reactionary mouth-breather, the sort of teen that parents fear producing. And people love her.

“Shut up, betch!” She says, and darned if it isn’t funny. Kelly first caught on in a bizarre YouTube short called “Shoes”. The entire skit is about this obnoxious girl shopping for shoes. “Oh my God, shoes”, she drools, staring in store windows. The whole skit is set to a beat, but the most amusing thing about it is Liam’s impersonation of the current Valley accent.

“These shews are three hundred dah-lers…

These shews are three hundred dah-lers…

These shews are three hundred dah-lers…

LET’S GYET-UHM!!”

If Kelly’s vowels all keep lowering at the rate they are going, we’ll soon have jokes like the British do about their vowels raising:

A judge halts proceedings in his court when he realizes that he left a pertinent document at his cottage, where he’d been perusing it over the weekend.

“Fax it up, sir,” suggests the bailiff.

“Yas, it does, rather,” muses the judge.

I don’t know if this is specific to Los Angeles or it cropped up all over the country in 2004 and just happened to coincide with my move here, but personally I think it’s an L.A. thing. People don’t say “you’re welcome” anymore. It’s too formal, apparently, even chilly. I thought we’d all settled on the easy-breezy, “No problem” in reply to thanks, but that lacks the panache that we crave out here on the coast.

So now it’s “No worries”.

At first I thought it was just my property manager, to whom I get to apologize often because I traipse in late with the rent about once every three months. “No worries,” she’d say, and I’d think “Isn’t that an Australian thing? I thought she was from Canada”. Then I noticed my neighbors from New York and Illinois, also chirping “no worries”. The guy at the coffee shop, from Alabama, has no worries. Most of the waitresses and bartenders I encounter are similarly unworried by my abrupt changes in drink order.

I am wondering, now, if this is an indicator that Australia is the new Europe. Americans love to borrow European slang to show off how cool we are. For a while, everything was “brilliant”, but that soon faded. Perhaps Europe isn’t the ‘in’ thing anymore. Perhaps we will start saying “I got into a blue (fight),” and telling people to “rack off” when we are tired of them. Maybe we’ll all “have a naughty” instead of getting laid.

I suppose it’s too soon to say. For now, all I can assume with any assurance is that nobody in Los Angeles is worried. Well, not the white people anyhow. Hispanics are still worried, probably for good reason, but that’s a whole different blog entry.

When I first came to L.A., I was struck by how many people would say “my bad” instead of “excuse me” or “I’m sorry” or “oops”. I confess, I’ve never liked it.

It seems too blithe, too easy, too short. It’s almost flippant to hear adults using a phrase that sounds so infantile. The word “bad” is so basic, it’s one of the first words babies learn. Even dogs understand a stern “Baaaad!!” It’s on the Swadesh word list, for Pete’s sake. It has even less distinctiveness than “nice”, as in “Oh, that’s nice, dear.”

There’s also an observable lack of actual apology or regret attached to the phrase. It really does not mean “I feel bad about this, I should not have done it, I am sorry”. It just means, “Yeah, I screwed up”. It’s acknowledgment, and little else.

“My bad” is no more attractive coming from children than it is from adults. My students use it constantly. You didn’t do your homework? “My bad”. You lost your pen? “My bad”. You were swinging your padlock around on the knotted end of your gym shirt and you whacked Min Sun on the face with it, and now she’s bleeding and crying in the nurse’s office? “My bad”.

There’s a real lack of any sense of perspective when you can use the same phrase to excuse ‘lost-my-pencil’ as you use to excuse ‘incapacitated-the-best-student-in-the-class’.

I am about ready to start snarling at anyone who says “my bad”. I will be glad when it becomes uncool, probably somewhere around November of 2009. I only hope nothing even more flippant replaces it. I can just imagine someone slamming into my car at that evil intersection at Hillhurst and Sunset before shrugging and offering, by way of apology, “Yep, that was me”.