Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Pop Language in Your Life, the Media, and Like . . . Whatever

by Leslie Savan

In this marvelously original book, three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Leslie Savan offers fascinating insights into why we’re all talking the talk— Duh; Bring it on!; Bling ; Whatever! —and what this reveals about America today. Savan traces the paths that phrases like these travel from obscure slang to pop stardom, selling everything from cars (ads for VWs, Mitsubishis, and Mercurys all pitch them as “no-brainer”s) to wars (finding WMD in Iraq was to be a “slam dunk”). Real people create these catchy phrases, but once media, politics, and businesses broadcast them, they burst out of our mouths as celebrity words, newly glamorous and powerful. Witty, fun, and full of thought-provoking stories about the origins of popular expressions, Slam Dunks and No-Brainers is for everyone who loves the mysteries of language.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Writing

353 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Emily]

Unfortunately, I did subject myself to the entirety of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers, which must rank among the most tiresome books on language that I've ever read. The author is attempting to show how "pop phrases" (by which she means a sort of media-driven cliche) pervade the culture and undermine intelligent discourse. She shows one or two examples of how "pop phrases" can come from the media and become part of slang ("Whaassssup?") and how they can come from the street and be adopted by the media ("Mickey D's").

The problem is that Savan quickly abandons any attempt to adhere rigorously to this definition. Instead, she rags on phrases that happen to annoy her. Everything from her five-years-ago version of netspeak to the bland cliches of the boardroom is subjected to her interpretation of what's really going through the head of the offender when the phrase is used. For example,

When I say "No way" and you say "Way," we may be exchanging a nod of appreciation for our mutual acquaintance with Wayne and Garth [...:] but we are also reducing each other to interchangeable parts, minor guest stars in that moment's passing sitcom.

Totally forgotten? The fact that we are also saying to each other "I don't believe it!" and "No, really, it's true!" At no point did she convince me that these "pop phrases" were any different than ordinary cliches, writ large on billboards.

Occasionally Savan writes something totally ridiculous, such as when she uses the stupid-sounding "Japlish" instead of the established term "Engrish." Or when she asserts that "dilio" is "a kind of ironic goateed Latino for deal, [that:] started as spoken, moved to Hollywood [...:] but now resides mostly in blogdom." Blogdom? Dilio? Savan writes a little pre-emptive defense about how some terms may be passé by the time the book is published, but what she doesn't manage to explain away is the air of general cluelessness that wafts through the entire book. You certainly don't get any idea of her doing research on the "street"; most of her citations are from newspapers, mainstream magazines, Salon, Meet the Press, and other media that she likely encounters in her everyday life. Not, say, hip-hop clubs or Myspace.

In one instance, she does find an excellent example of a company trying to use slang to its advantage and botching it: the very short lived McDonald's ad on ESPN that read "DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER? I'D HIT IT."

Meanwhile, the writing borders, at times, on the painful. Take this excerpt from a section at the end of the introduction that is meant to be over-the-top funny:

Whatever. I'm talkin' about a book that, best-case scenario, takes no prisoners as it puts its ass on the line [oh, there's more but I'm cutting it for you:] and gives 110 percent to explain that even though pop words rock, they like, really suck. Oh, they sound smart, but, trust me, I'm going to step up, break 'em down, and show you they ain't called no-brainers for nothing.

Does Savan realize that "rock" and "suck" are, roughly speaking, antonyms? Is there anything more annoying that a book about slang that "piles on" "quirky" words in the text which is meant to sound "with it" but actually comes off as "totally freaking annoying"? I had ample time to ponder that question with this book as my only companion on a New Jersey Transit train.

[Dennis Littrell]

Dynamite and it rocks

Okay all you ignorami out there, listen up. So you've had a bad hair day and the axis of evil is on your case. You've been there and done that big time. You've kicked Major Buttski, and whatever, and it only hurts when you laugh (your foot, that is). You've seen men and women behaving badly and you've been behind the eight ball. Despair not. Get a life not a library card because the real deal lingo is going down in your part of town--well, in this book.

Descriptive grammarians unite! Push those old fuddy-duddies out the door. This voluptuous volume of edible prose is da bomb! It is finger lickin good to linguists and lexicographers and cultural anthropologists on the make. And all you old stuffy school marms and proscriptive grammarian types, "Don't even THINK about telling me I don't THINK so." (Actually a title of one of the chapters in this oh so delectable wordsmith's book of manna from heaven.)

All right, enough.

When as an undergraduate I first heard Bob Dylan--well, when I first parsed his lyrics--it occurred to me that this man sings in cliches! (I'm resisting a "duh" here.) This is NOT poetry was what my English major mind thought. And then when I was one and twenty (I was so much older then) it occurred to me that Dylan was using not words themselves to make up his poetic lines, but groups or phrases of words, of cliches, the words we all use and hear day in and day out, and THAT was the basis of his lyrical poetry.

Wow, talk about your enlightenments! Anyway, what culture critic and word spinner deluxe Leslie Savan has done in this book is something akin to that. She has taken the phrases of pop language (as she calls it) and turned an examination of those phrases into a lexicographer's search for the derivation of terms. As all lovers of dictionaries know, you can learn a lot about history, sociology, psychology and such by just studying the dictionary. Well, Savan has learned a lot about the pop culture from studying its expressions. There is a psychology behind "yo, dude!"; there is a sociology contained in "like, you know, make my day"; there is a biology behind the f-word; there is some economics in "do the math"; and some history in "plausible deniability."

One of the reasons I am able to grab hold of these pop phrases so easily is that Savan has provided an index that, well, lists them (or most of them) by page number. Because Savan is an expert on advertising and the media, having written a column on the same for The Village Voice for many years, she just naturally has bouncing around in her head all matter of cliches and pop sounds from the powerful mavens of media who try to tell us what to buy, how to dress and what to think.

But she doesn't stop there. One of the chapters is on "digital talk," the words and phrases, "initialisms" and acronyms from emails and emessaging, from computerland and the Web, like "fresh, squeezed words," e.g., IMHO, LOTFLMAO, OMG, wtf? (caps optional or used WHEN SHOUTING!), the now ancient and soon to be forgotten WYSIWYG, and the fifteen minutes of fame tag, J. Lo.

Another chapter is on black pop that becomes white pop that becomes "said all over"--Ebonics and hip hop and whassup with that--you know what I'm saying? There are footnotes at the end of the book and a bibliography that includes people like Steven Pinker, Desmond Morris and Mark Twain, but not George Orwell. How he would have loved this book! Ditto for H. L. Mencken and Ambrose Bierce.

Some reviewers have tried to trivialize Savan's work, but look at it this way: her publisher is Alfred A. Knopf and you know they are as high brow and deadly serious as publishers can get.

Bottom line: this is an important work on American culture and language not to be missed, and a lot of fun to read.

--Dennis Littrell, author of the sensational mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”

[D. Norman]

Interesting word-o-logical history and exploration of popular phraseology. However this was written in 2005 and I’m reading it in 2018, so the journey ends with George Bush.

[Steve]

Savan laments overuse of the same language she uses all the time, even in this book, and the sly irony she intends is somehow muddled or lost. Sometimes the implication is, "See how bad this is?" and other times it seems like, "It's bad when they do this, but not when I do." This would be okay in a shorter piece (maybe a Harper's folio along the lines of David Foster Wallace's (classic?) lamentation about dictionaries and prescriptivism versus descriptivism) but doesn't hold up at book length.

I've been reading Savan since her Village Voice column on advertising. I loved The Sponsored Life and had high hopes for this book. I guess I'll just look forward to the next one.

[Robert]

In this book, Savan takes on what she calls "pop language", expressions that go beyond ordinary slang (or cliche) to give the user a performance-like edge - in other words, the jargon that makes us all feel like we're on tv. She's especially good on what she calls "halo words", expressions that go beyond the normal "p.c." connotations to soften unpleasant truths. If you're driven crazy whenever you hear "whatever" or "it's like, you know" - whenever people who should no better start speaking like characters in beer commercials or on "Friends", this book is a necessity.

[CR]

I couldn't get through this book. I was looking forward to a book that revels in things like language (both its etymology and its usage) and pop culture. Instead, I got a book where pop culture is actually kinda hated. And this would still be okay, if she were interesting in her discussion, but she enjoys just quoting things and saying, "See? This is annoying!"

[Zina]

again, i only read the part pertaining to aave. i just couldn't bring myself to continue on to valley-girl speak.

[Mari]

Informative and engaging. Learn about the history and development of pop language. You might be surprised.