July 29, 2004 - Confusing Synonyms and Confounding Political Terms

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: July 29, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we answer a few questions from listeners that really call for a dictionary editor.

RS: We called Peter Sokolowski, associate editor at the nation's oldest dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster, for some help.

AA: A listener by the name of Atefeh Aghaei asked about the meaning of the word “unconditional.”

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "It means absolute or unqualified. And in English, of course, there are always idioms associated with words. And unconditional love is one of the best of the idioms that come up very frequently with this word. But also it's used for unconditional surrender, and that was the famous phrase from 1945 at the end of the World War Two. And also most recently in the news we see unconditional release, meaning the release of prisoners without their being harmed."

RS: "In this one, this next one, what the listener wants to know is the difference between festival and carnival."

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "Festival really comes from the word feast, from the Latin, feast meaning a holy day, a holy feast. And carnival comes from the Latin 'carne levare' which means to raise or to remove meat, and that's the time before Easter called Lent where you abstain from eating meat. And it's interesting that the end of Lent is, of course, the feast of Easter.

"So what's interesting is these two words are sort of wrapped up together. The basic way to distinguish these words is that festival is much more general. You can use festival to say folk festival, arts festival, film festival, whereas there are two very specific senses of carnival. One is that pre-Lenten festival or celebration that we mentioned. The other is sort of an enterprise or place where there are amusements. And in America they might be traveling carnivals, something that would come from town to town and have maybe a carousel or I think of a lot of cotton candy and, uh ... "

AA: "And if you eat too much of that cotton candy, you might get sick. Or ill."

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "Or ill.”

AA: "Which brings us to our next question, from Alibek Suyumov, who wants to know, 'Could you please tell me what the difference is between the words sick and ill.'"

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "Sick and ill. You know, that's a great question. Again, two words that basically mean bad health, but just like festival and carnival, one of them is a little bit more general than the other, and in this case it's sick. We have many idioms in English that refer to bad health that aren't referring to a specific ailment or a specific disease. Like we would say 'I've been worried sick about you,' meaning that I'm very worried about you. 'I'm sick and tired of this.' And when someone talks about being ill, often it's a little bit more clinical or a little bit more technical. We say mentally ill or we say gravely ill, and it sounds a little bit more specific.

"Now there are secondary uses that are not quite so synonymous between sick and ill. In the case of sick, you could say 'that was a sick joke' or 'he has a sick sense of humor' or 'he's a very sick person,' which means he's disturbed or abnormal or maybe has a sense of humor that we don't approve of. It can mean mean, as in unfriendly. But with the word ill, you have the notion of ill will, which also means unfriendly. Or ill omen means unlucky."

RS: "Or ill-advised."

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "Ill-advised, exactly. These are very specifically bad things."

AA: But there was something specifically good about talking to a dictionary editor this week, with the Democratic convention in Boston. We wondered if any political terms in the news have sent people to the free dictionary online at webster.com.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "You know, one of the big words that is looked up frequently is democracy, because it's an abstract concept and it's something that folks need to sometimes remind themselves, and it's a word that is looked up quite frequently. One word that is very high this week is blog, and blog, of course, means a Web log, or a sort of journal kept on the Internet.

"And this is the first political convention to which many folks who maintain blogs, or bloggers as they're called, have been invited as journalists to record the events. So that word is very high on our list, and I'm very sorry to say it's such a new word it's not quite in our dictionary yet. [Laughter] But another word that came up is incumbent. Also the word stump, as in stump speech, I believe."

AA: "Incumbent, meaning the person who's currently in office, holding the office."

RS: "And stump, where a politician stands to give his speech."

AA: "Like a tree stump, because that's what they used to do, is stand on top of an old tree stump.”

RS: "So they can be seen."

PETER SOKOLOWKI: "Exactly. But a couple of other words if you just go back a week that came up that can broadly be called political, the word czar was looked up quite a lot last week, when the 9-11 Commission report brought up the notion of perhaps a new cabinet-level position which some people call the 'intelligence czar.' And czar, of course, comes from Caesar, meaning the sort of emperor, and it's the same root as the word in German 'kaiser,' and it means the leader."

AA: Peter Sokolowski is associate editor at Merriam-Webster. He invites you to visit the company's Web site at webster.com [also, merriam-webster.com]. You can look up words and also hear how to pronounce them.

RS: Our address here is voanews.com/wordmaster. And, if you have any questions or comments for us, e-mail them to word@voanews.com. Please tell us where you are from and how to pronounce your name.

With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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THE MAKING OF A NATION - James Polk, Part 1

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Broadcast: July 29, 2004

(MUSIC)

President James Polk" src="http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/Archive/images/James_Polk_gov_21July04_se_150jpg.jpg" width="150" border="0" height="148" hspace="0">

President James Polk

VOICE ONE:

THE MAKING OF A NATION -- a program in Special English.

(MUSIC)

As we reported in our last program of THE MAKING OF A NATION, Texas in the eighteen-forties had become a major issue in American politics. Congress in eighteen-hundred-forty-five passed a resolution inviting Texas to join the Union as a state.

President Tyler signed the bill on March first, just three days before he stepped down as president and James K. Polk moved into the White House. Britain and France tried to prevent Texas from becoming a state. They got Mexico to agree to recognize Texas independence, but only if Texas would not join the United States. Texas thus had two choices. It could become a state in the United States. Or it could continue as a republic, with its independence recognized by Mexico. The Texas Congress chose statehood.

VOICE TWO:

James Polk had campaigned for the presidency on two promises. He declared that he would make all of Texas and all of Oregon part of the United States. The people had elected Polk because they shared his belief that the United States should extend from sea to sea -- from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. They felt it was God's will, and their duty, to spread American democracy and freedom across the continent. In the words of poet Walt Whitman:

"It is for the interest of mankind that America's power and territory should be extended...the farther, the better."

VOICE ONE:

Traders from New England were the first Americans to visit Oregon. They stopped on the Oregon coast to trade for animal skins.

Later, American explorers Lewis and Clark crossed the Louisiana territory to reach Oregon. And in eighteen-hundred-eleven, John Jacob Astor built a fur trading center at the mouth of Oregon's Columbia River.

British explorers had given Britain claims to the same territory. The British Hudson's Bay Company also built a trading center on the Columbia and claimed a large area north of it. The two countries could not agree on how to divide Oregon between them. Since there were few settlers in Oregon, Britain and the United States agreed to occupy the territory jointly.

This system worked well until the eighteen-forties. Then, thousands of Americans began moving west to Oregon. The new settlers were not satisfied with the joint occupation agreement. They wanted all of Oregon to belong to the United States.

VOICE TWO:

President Polk said he thought the United States had strong claims to all of the territory. But he said he would compromise. He offered to divide Oregon at the forty-ninth parallel of latitude. All north of this line would belong to Britain. All south of it -- including the Columbia River -- would belong to the United States.

The offer was given to Britain's minister in Washington. He rejected it, refusing even to send it to London. He said Britain would accept nothing but the Columbia River as the southern border of British Oregon. President Polk withdrew the offer. He said America had no choice but to claim all of Oregon. He used strong language and seemed to say that the United States would fight, if necessary, to defend its claim.

VOICE ONE:

Polk really did not want war. But he thought a strong position was necessary in negotiating with Britain. He said softer treatment only led to stronger demands from Britain. Polk asked Congress to give him permission to end the joint occupation agreement. It did so in the spring of eighteen-hundred-forty-six.

In London, the British government decided that Oregon was not worth a war with the United States. It had demanded the Columbia River border because of the Hudson's Bay trading center on the river. The center had been moved farther north to Vancouver Island. So there was no real reason to continue this demand. The British foreign minister proposed a treaty that would make the forty-ninth parallel of latitude the border between the United States and British Oregon. The proposal was almost the same that President Polk had made earlier.

VOICE TWO:

Leaders in the western United States demanded that Polk reject the British offer. They wanted all of Oregon. Polk decided to let the Senate vote on the British proposal. The Senate accepted the treaty, and Polk signed it.

The treaty made the forty-ninth parallel the border from the Rocky mountains to the Pacific Ocean. The southern border of the Oregon territory was the forty-second parallel. South of this was California. The United States, for some time, had wanted to buy California from Mexico.

Former President Tyler had asked his minister to Mexico to try to buy California. The minister, Waddy Thompson, had been to California. He described it as the richest, the most beautiful, the healthiest country in the world. Thompson said the port of San Francisco was big enough to hold all the navies of the world. He said San Francisco, some day, would control the trade of all of the Pacific Ocean.

VOICE ONE:

There was little chance that Thompson could get California from Mexico. But then something happened that destroyed any chance of getting California peacefully. The commander of a United States navy force in the Pacific, Thomas Jones, received news that led him to believe the United States was at war with Mexico.

He sailed to Monterey, the capital of California. The navy force arrived there in October, eighteen-hundred-forty-two. Jones and his men seized Monterey and held it for two days. He found he had made a mistake and returned the town to Mexican officials. Jones apologized. But his actions greatly angered Mexican leaders. They refused even to talk about selling California to the United States.

VOICE TWO:

Mexico broke relations with the United States when Congress approved statehood for Texas. Mexican officials had warned that Texas statehood would lead to war. After Polk became president, he sent a representative to Mexico to try to establish diplomatic relations again. A weak government was in power in Mexico, headed by President Jose Joaquin Herrera.

Herrera at first agreed to meet with the American, John Slidell, to discuss four offers from President Polk. Earlier, Mexico had agreed to pay more than two-million dollars for damages claimed by Americans. But it did not have the money. Slidell was to offer to pay these claims if Mexico would accept the Rio Grande River as the border between Texas and Mexico. And America would pay Mexico five-million dollars for New Mexico and twenty-five-million more for California. If these offers were rejected, Slidell was to try to buy part of California for five-million dollars.

VOICE ONE:

Slidell arrived in Mexico city in December, eighteen-hundred-forty-five. The Mexican government had grown even weaker. And Herrera was afraid he would be forced from power if he met with the American diplomat. The Herrera government fell anyway. And the new Mexican government refused to talk with the American representative. Slidell returned to the United States, firm in the belief that only force could win the Mexican territories the United States wanted.

President Polk shared Slidell's belief. He learned in January, eighteen-hundred-forty-six, that Mexico had refused to negotiate with his representative. Polk had wanted a peaceful settlement of the differences with Mexico. This now seemed impossible. Perhaps, he thought, a more forceful policy would Make Mexico negotiate.

VOICE TWO:

President Polk had sent several thousand American soldiers to Texas six months before, when Texas accepted statehood. This force, led by General Zachary Taylor, had camped near the town of Corpus Christi at the mouth of the Nueces River. Polk now ordered Taylor's soldiers to the Rio Grande River. He told them to stay on the north side of the river. Should Mexico attack, Taylor and his men were to strike back as hard as possible. General Taylor was glad to get his orders. For months, his men had been training at Corpus Christi. They were ready for action.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

You have been listening to the Special English program, THE MAKING OF A NATION. Your narrators were Jack Weitzel and Lew Roland. Our program was written by Frank Beardsley. THE MAKING OF A NATION can be heard Thursdays.

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July 22, 2004 - Infowalker

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(VOA Photo - Mike O'Sullivan)

Broadcast: July 22, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a new way to walk through the Web.

RS: Infowalker is a free computer program available on the Internet. It's called a browser companion, and the focus is on foreign-language learners, children and the visually impaired. It reads Web pages out loud, finds pictures to illustrate words, and translates text into or out of English.

BOB MYERS: "At the moment we have Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. But we do have plans to expand that list of languages in the near future."

AA: Bob Myers is founder of a software company in West Hollywood, California, called Naturally Open. Infowalker is its first product. Bob Myers calls it a better way to browse the Web, though it's not meant for pages with lots of graphics and without much text.

BOB MYERS: "There are also a large number of Web pages which are basically huge masses of text. And those are really the pages that Infowalker is trying to help people read better, translate better."

AA: "I liked the way you could speed up or slow down the rate of speech, to help a little bit with the understanding, and there's also a selection of three different voices you can [use] -- a female voice, a couple of male voices."

BOB MYERS: "The voices are, of course, computer-generated voices. And in some cases -- I hope none of your listeners try to learn English pronunciation by listening to those voices, because they'll end up sounding like a computer voice."

AA: "It wasn't that bad."

BOB MYERS: "It's not that bad, yes."

AA: "You've also got the feature where it will look for pictures related to key terms on the page that's being read. It was kind of funny to see the photos that it would pull up to illustrate the texts."

BOB MYERS: "Right. This is a feature where Infowalker, when you point it to a sentence, will automatically go into the sentence and identify keywords within the sentence which it thinks represent the important concepts in that sentence. And then based on those keywords, it goes out onto the Internet and automatically finds a picture which represents those concepts it identified. And it shows that picture to you also in the little Infowalker window in the lower right hand corner of your screen."

AA: "Although I must point out that in some cases the photos had absolutely nothing -- or at least didn't seem to have anything to do with the sentence. But other photos certainly did. It helped illustrate what it was reading."

BOB MYERS: "There's a new feature which we have added in the version which we are going to be releasing actually in just a few days which I think will partially solve that problem. What it lets you do is instead of only working on a sentence-by-sentence basis, it actually lets you select specific text within anywhere on the Web page. And then it does all the same things that Infowalker does now, which is it can translate that text, put up an image about that text, speak the text aloud."

RS: "Now this is a free service."

BOB MYERS: "This is absolutely free. It's not shareware that you're expected to pay something for later. The way we make our money is that, as your users will see if they download this product, there's a small, non-intrusive line which displays an advertisement. Which actually in some cases is useful, and people may want to click through and see what the advertisement is about."

RS: "So what are your expectations for this product?"

BOB MYERS: "The vision that I have is that Infowalker could become an integral part of the browsing process for many different kinds of people. I certainly think that includes foreign language learners. I think it also includes visually impaired people; another feature of Infowalker is that it can display text in large type, which is useful obviously for the visually impaired. I think it has a potential market in the educational area and also among children, especially using this automated ability to illustrate the sentence or phrase that you selected."

AA: And it's not just groups like these that Bob Myers thinks can benefit. He says Infowalker is a useful tool for general Web searching. So where can you download it?

RS: You can go directly to his company's Web site at naturallyopen.com/infowalker. Or you can also link from our site, voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address here is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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July 15, 2004 - Baseball in American English

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: July 15, 2004

INTRODUCTION: Major League Baseball had its All Star Game Tuesday night. And, for the seventh time in the last eight years, top players from the American League defeated the National League. That means the American League will have the home-field advantage again in the World Series at the end of the season.

Now, our Wordmasters step up to the plate, to help give you a home-field advantage with some of the many baseball-related expressions in American English. Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble talked to a linguist at Berkeley and found out that we can thank sportswriters for many these terms.

AA: Baseball started in the eighteen-hundreds, and Maggie Sokolik says writers made up colorful ways to describe the game. After all, in those days, there was no television to watch the national pastime!

RS: A lot of those phrases hit a home run with Americans, so today even people who don't follow baseball might still talk about doing something "right off the bat."

SOKOLIK: "And if you can imagine a baseball striking the bat, that instant that things happen, things go very quickly, so if you need to do something fast, you might want to do it right off the bat. Similarly now if you have a large plan, say in business, in which you need to accomplish several tasks, you might tell your colleagues that you've 'touched all the bases,' you've contacted people -- you've 'covered your bases' as well, that is, you've prepared adequately."

RS: Which means that you've probably gone beyond rough estimates, or "ballpark figures."

SOKOLIK: "Often if we're talking, and perhaps we're negotiating, perhaps we might say, 'you know, we're not even in the same ballpark,' meaning my figures are so different from yours that we're not even communicating about them."

AA: "Why a ballpark?"

SOKOLIK: "Well, we have this notion of a ballpark as being a sort of rough area. The playing field doesn't really have a definite boundary. The diamond itself does, but what extends beyond the diamond doesn't have a specific dimension assigned to it. Similarly with time, an inning can be five minutes, an inning could be fifty minutes, it just depends on how long it takes to get all the outs in."

AA: "And it's still if you get three strikes you're out."

SOKOLIK: "Exactly."

AA: "And it's not just in baseball anymore. We hear that now in laws. I know in California, if you commit three serious crimes ..."

SOKOLIK: "Yes, three felonies and then I think it's a lifetime sentence after that. It 's call the 'three-strike law,' three strikes and you're in prison. I think a less happy baseball metaphor than most of them are."

RS: "Do you have a favorite baseball expression?"

SOKOLIK: "I think the ones that I like, there's a lot of baseball expressions that really focus on people making mistakes, because errors in baseball are sort of what make the game interesting and exciting and also make us scream and tear our hair out in the stands. So when you talk about people being 'off base' -- or 'way off base' in fact -- that means that they're really quite wrong. There's also the term, to call someone a 'screwball' which is a type of pitch, but also means that someone is sort of crazy and not thinking straight. If we talk about someone who's really capable, we talk about them being 'on the ball.'"

RS: "Do you see that our baseball vocabulary is evolving, especially since we are attracting athletes from outside the United States, from Central and South America, from Japan. Do you find that with these players coming to the United States, that they're also bringing a new vocabulary into baseball?"

SOKOLIK: "Well, interestingly enough, not a lot, because the answer is that American baseball vocabulary has begun to travel overseas, so the language they bring with them is that which was exported to begin with."

AA: As far as creating new terms, Maggie Sokolik at the University of California at Berkeley says American baseball is in a slump. Still there are more baseball-related phrases out there than most people realize.

RS: In fact, University of Missouri Professor Gerald Cohen tells us the earliest citations for "jazz" had nothing to do with music. San Francisco newspaper writer "Scoop" Gleeson used the term "jazz" in nineteen-thirteen to describe enthusiasm and spirit on the baseball field.

AA: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And you can find all of our programs at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

[Interview first aired on VOA in April 2001]

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July 8, 2004 - Lida Baker: Common Sentence Errors

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: July 8, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away. But with me from Los Angeles this week on Wordmaster is English teacher Lida Baker.

LB: "What we're going to talk about today is four types of common sentence errors, the kinds of mistakes that I see in my students' writing all the time. And I'm going to give some examples, and it might be easier for the listeners to follow along with me if they could write down the examples that I give. So the first type of error is called a sentence fragment. Now what is a fragment?"

AA: "A little piece of something."

LB: "A little piece of something. So a sentence fragment is a little piece of a sentence. It's not a complete sentence. So let me give you the most common example of a sentence fragment that I see in people's writing all the time. It goes something like this: 'I never eat chocolate. Because I'm allergic to it.' Do you see the problem?"

AA: "Yes. That really should be one sentence."

LB: "That really should be one sentence, right. Now the first part -- 'I never eat chocolate (period)' -- that's fine, because that is a sentence. It has the subject 'I', and then it has the verb part 'never eat,' OK? So that's a complete sentence.

"The problem is the second part, 'because I'm allergic to it.' That can't stand alone as a sentence. What you have to do is you have to connect it to the complete sentence that came before it. When it stands by itself, it's called a dependent clause, or a subordinate clause. And the way that you fix a problem like this is that you take that dependent clause and you attach it to an independent clause, which is the same thing as a full sentence."

AA: "Wouldn't some people say there should be a comma in there, between those two clauses?"

LB: "No, no, no. Because if you put a comma in there, what you're doing is creating a different kind of sentence error, which is called a comma splice. In a comma splice, you have two sentences, two complete sentences that are separated by a comma. But what they should have in between is a period. So an example would be something like this: 'I never eat chocolate, I'm allergic to it.' Do you see how each of those parts is a complete sentence? So according to the rules of punctuation, we cannot use a comma to separate those two parts of the sentence."

AA: "So now we've gotten through the fragment and the comma splice. So what's next?"

LB: "Next we have what's called a run-on sentence. A run-on sentence consists of two independent clauses. And, remember, an independent clause is the same thing as a sentence. So it's two independent clauses that are not separated by any punctuation. So you have something like: 'I never eat chocolate I'm allergic to it.' In that case you can even hear that it's wrong. Because to say 'I never eat chocolate I'm allergic to it' doesn't even sound right. If we say it this way, though, 'I never eat chocolate (pause) I'm allergic to it,' you can actually hear where the period is supposed to go, right?"

AA: "Right."

LB: "It goes in the middle, between the two sentences."

AA: "OK, we've got fragment, comma splice, run-on sentence, and the fourth kind of sentence error is ... ?"

LB: "The stringy sentence. Let me give you an example of a stringy sentence: 'I never eat chocolate because I'm allergic to it, and I don't like nuts either, so I never eat them, but I'm not allergic to them, so last week I went out and I bought some nuts.' Now what do you think is wrong with that?"

AA: "Is that all one sentence?"

LB: "Yes, that is a stringy sentence. What we have there is a whole string of sentences, of independent clauses. All of them are separated by a comma and a conjunction: and, so, but. And as long as you punctuate it correctly with a comma and a conjunction, it isn't wrong. But you can hear that it just doesn't sound right. It sounds like somebody who's just babbling. And it's not considered good writing.

"Good writing is writing where you have a lot of variety in your sentences. Some of them are short. Some of them are long. Some of them are simple. Some of them are compound. Some of them are complex. So it's not static. It isn't symmetrical, OK? There is a lot of variety and a lot of different rhythms. This is what we consider to be good writing."

AA: Lida Baker writes textbooks for English learners, and she teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Internet users can find all of her previous segments at voanews.com/wordmaster. And the e-mail address for Wordmaster is word@voanews.com. I'm Avi Arditti.

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July 1, 2004 - Hip-Hop Slang

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: July 1, 2004

HOST: Hip-hop music -- born in the rough and tumble of America's predominantly black inner city neighborhoods -- is one of the most successful musical styles in popular culture today. But music is just one face of the hip-hop phenomenon. Hip-hop has also had a significant impact on youth slang. For this Wordmaster segment, VOA's Adam Phillips went to a hip-hop gathering to learn about the lingo.

ADAM PHILLIPS: In Newark, New Jersey, one of the East Coast cities where hip-hop began, teenagers like Dancette still like to dance to the latest hits with their friends -- right on the sidewalk. She says hip-hop slang is a big part of the fun. She especially enjoys the way hip-hoppers sometime invest mainstream American words with new meanings.

DANCETTE: "Like when some people say 'phat.' It's not really 'fat,' like 'not small.' Phat is good. I don't know why they do that, but it's a street thing. Something cool to say."

AP: "Give me another example."

DANCETTE: "'Gangsta.' Usually when people say or when I say gangsta, it's more street, more underground, and not too preppy like 'straight' [conventional]. It's more relaxed. It's more down. That's what gansta is."

AP: "Down?"

DANCETTE: "When you down, it's like being a part of something."

AP: "You go along with it."

DANCETTE: "Yes." AP: Dancette's friend Jett, one of the more free-spirited dancers on this street corner, loves the word "crunk."

JETT: "And crunk really means just let loose [relax], be your own person, have fun and do what you do -- not worrying about what anyone thinks about you."

AP: "So getting 'crunked' is just being natural?"

JETT: "Yeah. Being natural and having fun." AP: As in any living language, hip-hop words keep evolving. But this young woman says the meaning of some hip-hop slang words can change -- literally overnight.

WOMAN: "One thing I always liked about hip-hop -- you could use a word one day and the next day it's something else. That's the beautiful thing about hip-hop. Three are new inventions for the hip-hop generation every day. So you gotta keep up!"

AP: She and her friend say that "off the chain" is one phrase they've heard quite a bit lately. FIRST WOMAN: "Off the chain -- it's 'off the hook.' It's cool. It's good. So extraordinary. You could go to a concert and it just be off the chain. It just means 'wow' and 'it was fun' and exuberant and everything."

SECOND WOMAN: "Some words we take and reinvent it. Like 'crazy' could mean something good. Crazy, something spontaneous. 'That was crazy!'"

FIRST WOMAN: "Our language is cool. It's a hip-hop language. It's just us. It's a way of our life. That's what we do every day." AP: Hip-hop speech isn't just for teen-agers. Adults use it to express themselves as well. (MUSIC)

That's Ameen, a young man from Oakland, California, rapping his own hip-hop number for his friend Rudy Corpus Junior and another buddy. RUDY CORPUS: "He's talking the [San Francisco] Bay in the house. We hold the dam from the O to the 'sco. Huh! We put it down like four flats on a Cadillac. Huh!

AP: "What are the words you're using?

RUDY CORPUS: "It's slang. It's words that was borrowed from the ghettos, you know what I mean? Cats come up with different types of slang just to tell you how they feel or just to express emotions. And it just comes naturally. Because we was born into this, we wasn't sworn into this." AP: Some hip-hop slang is used as a sort of secret code. FRIEND: "You don't always want people to understand exactly what you talking about anyway, you know what I mean? You could be talking about something illegal. And you don't want to be saying 'oh yeah, I got the elbow,' you know what I'm saying? You don't want to tell everybody what you got and what you're working with. So you want to have a way to talk to your people and get the message across without everybody knowing what's going on.

AP: Indeed, many hip-hop words originate in prisons. Rudy Corpus.

RUDY CORPUS: "I'm gonna give you a word, 'merkin.' Yeah, merkin means choking somebody out, man. Grabbing them from behind the neck and just choking them; someone who is 'out of pocket,' someone who ain't respecting you, someone who isn't coming at you properly, you gonna have to merk his ass out. You feel [understand] me? Like the police merkin people out all the time. You know what I mean?

AP: Many hip-hop words have entered the world's working vocabulary. The words chillin' (pronounced without the g), meaning relaxing or taking it easy, and bling-bling, meaning fancy and expensive goods, are just two examples. Still, Ameen says that true hip-hop slang will always be rooted in the local neighborhoods where one's friends are and where life is lived. AMEEN: "It's like being a part of that brotherly bond. And that's the thing that feels good about it. It's your people, and you hear other people using it, it's kind of flattering, you know what I'm saying? Even if they don't give the recognition like they are supposed to! It feels good to hear people out there 'biting' [using] your slang, basically. It's communication, you know what I mean? It's communication."

AP: For Wordmaster, this is Adam Phillips reporting from Newark, New Jersey.

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