Slangcronyms

There is a new slanguage emerging from hashtags, and they are interesting in their capacity for secondary meanings, conceptual capacity, and function as metaphor. They are a kind of title, or parenthetical, or slangcronym, like "AMA". It is a new slang "acculturated" with code.

Subgenres in music started in the 90s, as a result of remix, among other factors. Using language as a metaphor, remixes are slangs. David Bowie championed the idea of experimentation over familiarity, specifically his interest in wordplay, like cut-up, a slang not unlike hashtags or remixes.

Abbreviation, acronymization (as it were) and neologism are all forms language remix in which words and/or phrases are truncated or cut-up. Using an analogy from film, drop-frame is the removal of frame numbers for the purpose of aligning timecode with clock time. This isn't a slang but is necessary to reconcile time display discrepancies. Including all vowels in a word is probably a redundancy, and they could be dropped (drop-vowel as the corollary to drop-frame). For example, the word "allowed" would become "allowd". Disappearing would "becom disappearng". In music, accidentals are placed in the key signature, and any other accidentals that occur are placed once in a bar, and do not need to be repeated: Not all E-naturals would need a symbol placed before them. But searching and indexing relies on each word to remain intact, so cut-up or slang doesn't work with search, unless the words a "synonymized" where searching for one term finds all the others. Hashtags are a way to do this while adding conceptual layers or functions. #thisisinteresting #slanguage

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PS 2/2022:

Written by a second lieutenant in the Stasi’s central information service, these experimental lyrics still lie in a cache of poems at the Stasi Records Archive in Berlin, subsumed into the German federal archives last year. The folders full of typewritten verse – some written in jaunty rhyming couplets, others in tense vers libre – bear testimony to one of the most bizarre experiments of the socialist German Democratic Republic, when one of the most fearsome secret police forces in European history tried to weaponise the vaguest of literary disciplines, the “art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing”, as Edmund Burke once wrote. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/red-poets-society-the-stasi-poetry-circle-s-battle-for-hearts-and-rhymes-1.4796128