I have a real problem with the lexicographic community surrounding Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I bet not a lot of people could say that). This is partly because I once got into trouble for plagiarising one of them by lifting this sentence: "There is much experimentation in Buffyverse, with word order ('We so don't have time'), and with word form (Buffy often says 'sitch' instead of 'situation')." But mainly, well, for all the reasons flagged up in that plagiarised sentence - the word order phenomenon is a standard of American dialogue, probably originating in a 1980s teen film; the shortening of words is, again, standard, probably all over the world, because teens are lazy and don't like to say whole words. It's about as experimental as my aunt. While the desire to find deeper meaning in Buffy is legitimate and understandable, these lexics (oh, I shiver with my own innovation) really push it.
Michael Adams, though he writes very nicely and shows appropriate passion for the TV show, is no exception. There is plenty to like in this book, not least the author's extensive trawls of Buffy chatrooms, which are interesting for the words that are adopted and adapted from the programme (especially "AOHellmouth" to describe one's service provider playing up). But essentially, although the slang in Buffy is marked, it isn't what gives the dialogue its lift. You can call "sitch" experimental all you like, you can laud words such as "passiony" and "patheticness", but what makes this show funny are the good old-fashioned comedy staples - punning and wordplay, reversal of expectation, ironic high-style and bathos. Daft teenage shortenings and injudicious additions of "ville" to everything are nothing like as important as this book, and all others like it, suggest.
Giving them such importance carries a number of penalties, from being obvious to being plain wrong. Discussing the Slayer use of the word "much" (which he does often), Adams says "it trades on in-group semantics, in-group syntax and even what one might call the in-group cognition necessary for agreement on semantic and syntactic meaning". So, in order to reach consensus on the meaning of a word, as distinct from its traditional meaning, people need to have, well, reached a consensus. Thereafter, all usage of the word "trades" on that consensus. Well, sure, but that could be said of all slang and jargon everywhere, as well as all instances of a word "sliding" into a new meaning. I don't get a very Buffy thrill from that. Not one bit.
Likewise, I'm not too dazzled by this - "Buffy would say of a character that 'he's not exactly one to overshare'. Overshare . . . compactly and neutrally expresses the act of being stingy (with things or information, etc), for which standard English has no word, and for which the slang lexicon in the past depended on pejoratives, like jew." First, "oversharing" is an American term for giving too much personal information - it derives from the enjoinment in therapy to "share one's feelings". It's nothing to do with generosity in the arena of "things" or anything else that "etc" might encompass. Second, there are many English words for a lack of generosity that are neutral - to choose one at random, "near" (that's one from my crossword days). If they don't sound neutral, it's because stinginess isn't very nice (duh!). If "not oversharing" is neutral, on the other hand, it's because verbal brevity is neutral, and simply isn't synonymous with, or anything like, stinginess.
I hate to carp as much as the next man, but this is like watching frogs in a big-game park. There is serious academic study that could be undertaken on this programme, I swear it. But counting the instances of the word "smoochies" in seven series of marvellous Buffy ain't it.
Zoe Williams is a columnist on the Guardian
