Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Our fandom’s cyberspace is broken up into communities, housed on servers, scattered throughout the world. We have a culture, broken into tribes, with our own shared language that breaks into colloquialisms depending on which message board you call home.

If you’re a Buffista, and you’re sexy, you’re "foamy."

If you’re posting at Television Without Pity, you know all about HoYAY! (Homoeroticism, YAY!), and the MoG, AKA the Ministers of Grace, Angel’s cohorts so named after a line in Hamlet, "Angels and ministers of grace, defend us."

Bronzers don’t roleplay online, they WITT (Whedon Improvisational Theatre Troupe) during long stretches of reruns.

Lately, I’ve been picking up on our shared language, our gerundizations, spoken by Everyday People; bus drivers and record store clerks and hotel concierges, which is giving me the smug satisfaction of a person who’s experienced that weird sort of marginalization by people who get a glazed look on their face when I discuss the cultural implications of a cult hero who is a slight, skinny, woman who doesn’t always think beyond what’s going on with her current boyfriend.

My boss understands when I say that his travel plans are being stalled by "red tape-age" or when I describe a layout program as sort of "Quark-y, but in a Microsoft-y sort of way." This is Buffy speak, and Everyday People are starting to understand it, and not blink an eye when I use it. This is how new words enter our lexicon, through usage and understanding, not only by our online communities and fandom, but by Everyday People, who likely don’t realize the etymology of the words they are using comes directly from the keyboards of Mutant Enemy writers.

Michael Adams, a linguist at Albright College, is the author of a new book and glossary, also titled Slayer Slang, published by Oxford University Press, the folks that give us those big ass dictionaries. Slayer Slang includes an introduction by Buffy scribe Jane Espenson, who holds a Master’s in linguistics. It’s no small deal that academia is embracing our favorite program, and our language.

Adams lurked at the official message board, The Bronze, and later at the fansite The BronzeBeta, reading posts by fans, studying the way our fandom took those gerunds from Buffy and adopted them into our fandomy language.

From Buffy’s "slayage," a fan writes that a new movie has much in the way of "Christian Baleage" and yet another has to go to the doctor due to having been up all night with "blood coughage."

Michael Adams’ Buffycentric journey began in October 1997, when he was channel surfing past the WB, and heard some random teenager say the line, "Love makes you do the wacky." The professor of Medieval English Literature put down the Beowulf and the remote control and tuned into this little cult show until the end, and soon started cataloguing the slang and jargon and such. Suddenly there was a wealth of new words and old phrases used in new ways. Only Faith could bring back a term meaning "all is well" from the 1940s, "5x5" and make it sound fresh and cool and sexy.

"I don’t think any other television show has been as productive at bringing new words into the language as Buffy the Vampire Slayer," explains Adams. "Seinfeld has the classic, "Yadda yadda yadda," which we identify so much with that show, but it was already in common usage before that."

"[Buffy the Vampire Slayer] is a type of literature. Buffy is a text that people care about. The language used in the show is eloquent, it expresses things very precisely."

One example of precise expression is Xander’s "Does anyone else here feel Keyser Soze’d?" Adams described this morphing from noun to verb as "brilliant," and it is in its sharp, concise description of being hoodwinked in the most elaborate of ways. It’s a pop-culture reference that turns grammar on its ear in a poetic way. It sort of coaches the audience to then use other references in the same sort of way. One could be "Tonya Harding’d" by an assailant, and your audience would know you were bashed in the knee with a tire iron. That’s Slayer Slang.

Specific characters tend to use language in specific ways. Adams notes that Xander tends to turn adjectives into nouns: "…gives me a happy." Buffy shifts nouns into verbs.

When Tara asks her if she wants to come out of the closet regarding her relationship with Spike, Buffy replies that she’s "all stay inny." It’s sort of an adverbification, if there is such a word.

Cordelia is the queen of "much," as in "jealous much?" Adams says this can be traced back to the 1993 film, Heathers, but can’t find an instance of it in the media before, or after, until it became a huge part of Cordelia’s vocabulary, and then wound up in the pages of Mademoiselle magazine. This is how our slang becomes part of the mainstream lexicon.

Boring words: "I’m going to the store to get some ointment for that cyst on my back so it doesn’t swell."

Slayer slang: "I’m jetting over to the store to get some ointment for that oozey thing on my back before I get all Quasimoto."

BtVS’ language smacks you around with a sonic boom.

Because internet communities rely completely on the written word to survive, our shared language provides a bond that identifies us as Buffy fans, but because of its poetic sort of musicality, Slayer slang has provided us with a limitless diversity to our vocabularies. We can change up nouns and verbs and add suffixes not previously thought of to turn plain sentences into poetry.

I once gave an interview where I said, "If you can’t express yourself clearly using the written word, get the fuck off my message board." I still think this is true. Honoring BtVS is honoring the rich descriptiveness of the text, and using it in everyday life.

With Buffy the Vampire Slayer hurling towards its end, the fandom is grasping at ways to keep the show, and the communities built upon discussing the show, alive.

The best way to do that is to keep writing, keep speaking the Slayer slang. Use it as you’ve always used it, when you move on to new fandoms, new message boards.

Color your term papers with it.

"In conclusion, Pirsig’s obsession with trying to prove that classical thinking is superior to romantic thinking made his brain go wonky."

Add it to company memos on the importance of timeliness.

"It has come to the attention of management that some employees have developed the habit of arriving late to their desks in the morning. Please note that if this trend continues, it could result in much pay dockage."

Be a trendsetter when you write your sworn statement to the District Attorney.

"I proceeded to bludgeon the DMV clerk with my license plate in an altercation involving registration fees. What can I say? Standing in a line for six hours makes you do the wacky."

Keep Buffy the Vampire Slayer alive by continuing the tradition of its rich and textured use of language. Get Buffy, herself, into the Oxford English Dictionary by invoking her name as a description of kicking ass. "The Bursar’s Office lost my check, so I went all Buffy on the bastards." Keep it going.

My wish is that the immortal last words of Joss Whedon will come to mean an ending. Let the final words of every graduation, verdict reading, Last Rites, and final columns of ScoopMe writers be the last words in uttered in our Slayer slang.

Grr. Argh.