INTRO: What's hot and what's not in American slang. Here with an update — and another call for entries in the Wordmaster Name the Next Decade Contest — are VOA's Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble.

MUSIC: "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)"/The Offspring

AA: "Pretty fly" is slang for "pretty impressive." I'm Avi Arditti, and this song and the album it's from, "Americana" by The Offspring, have been soaring high on the Billboard charts.

RS: Which I'd say is pretty fly. I'm Rosanne Skirble, and today we look at a few terms in American slang.

AA: We can thank teen-agers, those incubators of popular culture, for most of our new expressions. But it's hard to keep up, since let's not forget that teens invent slang to stay one step ahead of adults.

RS: Fortunately we have Slangman, David Burke, an author who makes his living writing about this stuff.

AA: And he says one word he's hearing a lot lately is the word "so."

TAPE: CUT ONE — DAVID BURKE

"'So' is usually before an adjective, like 'I'm so tired,' 'I'm so happy,' 'you are so nice.' But the way teens are using it now, is using it in front of an expression, or verb. For example, if you are my employee and you do something really wrong, I might say, 'Rosanne, you are so fired.' Or I might say, "Avi, you are so not funny.' "

RS: Or, to put it another way:

TAPE: CUT TWO — DAVID BURKE

"Let's say we're at a party together, and this party is so not fun, I might say to you, 'Avi, Rosanne, I am so out of here.'"

AA: David Burke also reports that while "so" is so in, the word "not" is not these days.

TAPE: CUT THREE — DAVID BURKE

"One of the words that was very popular maybe last year and a few years before, the word 'not.' Now, 'not' was added to a positive expression to kind of mislead the other person so they think you're going to say something very nice, and suddenly you turn it around. For example, 'that is a beautiful dress you're wearing ... not!' That is now gone."

RS: How sad ... not! But 'not' is not the only word that's gone.

AA: David Burke says teens were using the adjectives "dope" and "fresh" to mean "fantastic." But that was last year.

TAPE: CUT FOUR — DAVID BURKE

"Now, teens are saying 'tight.' So if a teenager says to you, 'ooh, that is a tight shirt,' they're not talking about the size or the fit, they're talking about the coolness of it. And by the way, 'cool' and 'tight' are two of the most popular adjectives right now, I think the most popular of this decade. The reason cool has lasted so long I think is because there are so many different ways to pronounce it. That's what teenagers are telling me. In the fifties, people would say, 'that's cool,' and they'd stretch out that 'ooo' sound.

"And then teens were pronouncing cool as 'cool,' kind of like q-u-e-l. And rappers pronounce it 'coo.' So I think that's why it's staying with us, there are so many different ways to pronounce it, and who knows, maybe there will be another way to pronounce it next year."

AA: David Burke, who comes to us from Los Angeles.

RS: If you'd like to check out Slangman David Burke's books on slang and idioms, and for a list of the slang words and expressions you just heard on today's show, visit the slangman.com Web site. That's slangman, one word, dot com.

RS: Now here's a reminder of our Wordmaster Name the Next Decade Contest.

AA: In other words, what comes after the nineties? Send us a suggestion and you'll receive a VOA souvenir.

RS: But the cooler the idea, the cooler the souvenir. The deadline for entries is March second.

AA: A final note: This past week, the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington played its first concert in China. The program of American classics included the music by Leonard Bernstein from "West Side Story."

RS: We leave you with one of the songs, called "Cool," as recorded by the original Broadway cast in the 1950s — back when "cool" was "coooool." With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

MUSIC: "Cool"/West Side Story

詞匯點津：

今天的《詞匯大師》我們請來了老朋友David Burke，他向我們介紹了流行于美國青少年之間的一些熱詞俚語。比如：

so，通常放在形容詞前，現在用法很多樣，甚至可以放在動詞前面，如：“Rosanne, you are so fired.” 或“Avi, you are so not funny.”，甚至可以說“I am so out of here.”這里不適合我。

還有流行詞not，人們喜歡再一句陳述句后突然加加上一個“not”否定前面的話，有出人意表的效果。如：“that is a beautiful dress you're wearing ... not!”

年輕人還喜歡用“dope”和“fresh”來代表“fantastic”。

“tight”也不僅僅是表示松緊，它還有著“cool”的意思，比如：“ooh, that is a tight shirt”。另外多說一句，“tight”和“cool”是當下最流行的兩個詞匯了！