Saturday morning cartoons made my parents nervous. ""Ghostbusters"" was too violent, ""The Smurfs"" too ambiguous, and ""Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"" too ... too ... well, they were too much of everything. It wasn't turtle power, per se, that made them nervous—it was all that Saturday morning cartoons had come to represent and their ""unfortunate"" influence on my behavior. They taught me slang.
It all boiled down to one word—one response that shattered all they believed in, turned their world upside down and resulted in me getting hit on the head repeatedly with a leather wallet.
""Hey mom, all the kids at school think you're really cool."" Pause.
""Really? How nice of them! Well, tell them I think they are all neat.""
I snorted in anticipation of the crushing blow that would come next.
""NOT!""
Damn I got her good.
The beauty of ""not"" was in its understated, yet complex, simplicity. It lacked the punch and implied obsencity of ""sucks"" and ""blows"" (and, thankfully, it lacked the whacks over the head from grandmothers' wallets). It could be easily understood, unlike ""fresh"" (I never figured out the proper context for that one).
It appealed to those who weren't yet ready for the world of four-letter words and those with a set-up prowess like a jungle cat. You lured in your victim with something that seemed like a compliment, a random token of knowledge, an innocent conversation starter. They pondered your comment, and perhaps even a glint of a smile would start to appear across their face. Then bam! You shouted the three letters that spelled devastation!
But then it disappeared. What had spelled its demise?
It wasn't a question of maturity. Ten-year-olds don't suddenly lose interest in things (well, Pogs) and rapidly develop their vocabulary to exclude the one thing that exemplified their anti-establishment rebellion. Where did it go?
In ""not's"" absence, ""suck"" became commonplace and accepted (the head wallops stoppedA in proportion to its de-slangify-ing). I finally discovered the origin of ""blows"" and subsequently stopped using it. My fourth grade class tried to make ""sex"" a detention-worthy word, but all we got was a lecture about God's love and a scientific demonstration of pollination.
""Not"" left, and an entire generation grew up.
It's time we got it back.
The flexibility of the slang meaning is the key to ""not's"" survival. Where it once was relegated to the playground, it can now be moved into the academic sector. ""Not"" can become, if all students work hard enough, an accepted form of argumentative speech—one that can make common appearances in academic papers and master's theses, and, thus, lay the groundwork for the future acceptance of slang words that time has long forgotten.
Ahem.
""One cannot help but notice the obvious moral undertones in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. His effervescent portrait of the Russian nobility and bourgeoisie deals with morality in strictly black and white terms. According to Tolstoy, Anna Karenina is to be rewarded for having cast off the burden of her unfulfilling marriage and abandoning her young son ... Not.""
Now, if only someone can figure out how to reincorporate the shoulder-brush off and uttering of ""salty.""
