When Should You Retire Slang?

Even the most gangster slang has an expiration date.

Close your eyes, put an ear to the wind and you might just hear it. The wistful pop of slang leaving a grown-up’s mouth for the very last time.

The last ‘tubular!’ from an ‘80s surfer finally selling out. The last ‘insane!’ from a newly qualified mental health nurse. The last ‘pumplex!’ from a dad, just before the first ‘pumplex!’ from his 2-year-old. For most of us, there comes a time to trim slang from our dictionary.

Hearing myself describe a mid-range, collapsible clothes horse as ‘Gangster!’, I knew it was the right moment to say goodbye. ‘Gangster’ joins all of its predecessors that at one stage meant ‘good’ in retirement. It’s in ‘nang’ company, with the likes of ‘bad’, ‘dark’, ‘cris’ ‘fire’ and many more perfectly ‘wicked’ words, in the place where slang goes to die.

Whether or not my clothes horse is objectively gangster is up for debate. But now, even straight-up, dried-or-die cavalry that caught two slugs to the rack representing its set’s colours with a particularly damp load of heavy winter jackets, would no longer be gangster to me. I feel I don’t have any right to use that lingo anymore. And, as my use of ‘lingo’ demonstrates, I clearly never did.

Sadly, that’s not only the last time I’ll use ‘gangster’ to describe a foldable, portable drying apparatus, but probably the last time I’ll call anything ‘gangster’ from the whole drying apparatus family – and, before you all start on Twitter, yes, including wall-mounted.

Damn. It felt good to be a ‘Gangster’ user. Now it feels fat and clunky bouncing off my old, dry tongue. I had to force through the second syllable and it faded tragically early, like so many fake gangsters before it. 

That last ‘gangster’ probably had all the hesitation of the first attempt. None of the welly to really sell it - “That’s gangst..uh... ?” Back then it was an insecure kid borrowing a word, hoping not to get found out. Now it’s an old fuck accepting he’s become every played-out TV dad claiming to be “down with the kids”. I was two upturned Vulcan salutes away from actually feeling my sperm wince.

I picked up ‘Gangster’ subconsciously from a mate. Now, it’s time to put it back down again. The word belongs to a version of myself still aching to be cool. A rampaging berk who couldn’t grasp the concept of a drying rack, let alone unfold one to its full double-OG capacity.  

Banishing that badboy to the glossary of the past won’t be easy. Discontinuing slang means letting go of that part of life. I’ve had some fond usages of ‘gangster’. For quite a while there, a lot of gangster shit really did seem to be happening. Now, there’s only good stuff. ‘Badboy’ is currently under review by my internal cringe committee, but slang retirement normally isn’t conscious. We naturally phase out words as our environment changes.

Slang stops feeling right when there’s a cultural disconnect between you and that word. If you still feel part of the culture that the slang operates in – crack on. Ancient hippies who survive on nothing but shit weed and wing-mirror condensation can say “groovy” ‘til the cows come home. Relocating a VW camper against a bovine tide isn’t groovy, man. ‘Crack on’ is boozy old white dude slang. I will give consent with ‘crack on’, right to that last bed-bound morphine hit.

Or if you’re wildly successful nobody can say shit, when you substitute words with shit. Joe Rogan talks like a man half his age. If you happen to be a half-centurion who gets millions of downloads a month, you can speak however you chimp-shagging like, bro.

But, normally, either the slang stops being cool or you do - except ‘cool’, apparently. One day the sun will vaporize our earth, and some sulky, weightless space-goth will look on and say “cool.” But most words die out. Even the word ‘slang’ sounds about as old hat as, well, ‘old hat’. 

Maybe, it’s important to accept you’re past it. Better than grasping at Twitter slang and mispronouncing a 3-letter acronym with weaponised cringe. Or maybe, I’m fussing about other people’s perceptions too much. Say what you like. Who gives a stuff? That clothes horse was motherfucking g-g-g-gangster.