Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, “The Thieves’ Tongue” (The Book Bench Blog, The New Yorker, Nov. 11, 2010)
This month, in the Times’s On Language Column, Ben Zimmer, looking at students at the University of North Carolina, pointed out that the slang today is turning up a bouquet of words for “unfamiliar, suspicious or anxiety-producing outsiders.” Think “sketchball” and “creepazoid,” terms used not to create a clique but to warn, within it, of threats.
Read the rest here. (Related On Language column)