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A review by beeboisourgod
Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams
1.0
All I have to say to the writer is:
For a guy obsessed with words, he sure does a bad job of putting them together in an interesting way. This book reads like a textbook, and I often found myself absorbing no information whatsoever and reading the same sentence over and over and reading the same sentence over and over and reading the same sentence over and over... and, well, you get the point.
The beauty of "Buffy-speak" is that it doesn't need to be over-analyzed and dissected, it just is. It's in the moment. It's clumsy. It's quirky. It's flexible. I remember watching a featurette on the writers' process when coming up with dialogue and the point basically was: they're teenagers, if they don't know a word, they'll find a way around it, make a new one, make new use of old ones, change the language to their convenience, often in a way that's pretty easily understandable. Half the words in this book are simply ones that end in 'Y,' or 'age' or are things that need no explanation or deeper thought. "Dusty," "Vamp-y," "skulky," "stripy," "gladness", "glib-free," there's not anything particularly Slayeresque to these words, or really interesting in general. It's like how I might say something that's not quite purple is "purple-y," it shouldn't take 300 pages to analyze why I decided to say that or how that type of word changing-ness might catch on in society. Yet almost an entire chapter is spent on "Y", and another on solely the word "much," about 5 pages on the spelling of "smoochies" and in the span of 2 pages, we read "wiggins" 30 times.
I'm disappointed because this book started out promising, I enjoyed it up to about page 60 until it devolved into a sea of "morphologicals" and "lexicals" and eye roll-age.
Plus, I think including situations present only in the early 2000s Buffy Forum "The Bronze Beta" make it a cluttered mess of internet speak and parody, because obviously in a space dedicated to a single fandom, slang pertaining to said fandom will reach a state of humorous exaggeration between peers. It doesn't necessarily prove influence in other "sitches"
So, would not recommend, not even really to die hard Buffy-Fans, unless you are an English major who thinks a single sentence rife with the words "suffixation," "actuation," "syntactical," "ephemeral," "morphological," and ""unlexicalized" sounds like the embodiment of excitement. Otherwise? This was boring as all Hell (mouth).
For a guy obsessed with words, he sure does a bad job of putting them together in an interesting way. This book reads like a textbook, and I often found myself absorbing no information whatsoever and reading the same sentence over and over and reading the same sentence over and over and reading the same sentence over and over... and, well, you get the point.
The beauty of "Buffy-speak" is that it doesn't need to be over-analyzed and dissected, it just is. It's in the moment. It's clumsy. It's quirky. It's flexible. I remember watching a featurette on the writers' process when coming up with dialogue and the point basically was: they're teenagers, if they don't know a word, they'll find a way around it, make a new one, make new use of old ones, change the language to their convenience, often in a way that's pretty easily understandable. Half the words in this book are simply ones that end in 'Y,' or 'age' or are things that need no explanation or deeper thought. "Dusty," "Vamp-y," "skulky," "stripy," "gladness", "glib-free," there's not anything particularly Slayeresque to these words, or really interesting in general. It's like how I might say something that's not quite purple is "purple-y," it shouldn't take 300 pages to analyze why I decided to say that or how that type of word changing-ness might catch on in society. Yet almost an entire chapter is spent on "Y", and another on solely the word "much," about 5 pages on the spelling of "smoochies" and in the span of 2 pages, we read "wiggins" 30 times.
I'm disappointed because this book started out promising, I enjoyed it up to about page 60 until it devolved into a sea of "morphologicals" and "lexicals" and eye roll-age.
Plus, I think including situations present only in the early 2000s Buffy Forum "The Bronze Beta" make it a cluttered mess of internet speak and parody, because obviously in a space dedicated to a single fandom, slang pertaining to said fandom will reach a state of humorous exaggeration between peers. It doesn't necessarily prove influence in other "sitches"
So, would not recommend, not even really to die hard Buffy-Fans, unless you are an English major who thinks a single sentence rife with the words "suffixation," "actuation," "syntactical," "ephemeral," "morphological," and ""unlexicalized" sounds like the embodiment of excitement. Otherwise? This was boring as all Hell (mouth).