JOSHUA COMBRINK 18613349

AELS 318

TOTALLY RADICAL
A righteous experience of the appropriation of Californian surfer
sociolect into modern culture

Contents
Introduction........................................................................................................... 1
Subject of Analysis................................................................................................. 1
Dude...................................................................................................................... 1
Repetition as like, a Construction of Intelligence...................................................1
Totally Righteous Phonology and Construction......................................................2
Conclusion............................................................................................................. 2
Bibliography........................................................................................................... 3
Videography.......................................................................................................... 3
Appendix 1............................................................................................................. 4
Glossary of slang terms used............................................................................. 4
Introduction
Wassup dude.
Surfer lingo has been around since like, the sixties man. Through the most
heinous use of stereotypes in modern media, the lingo associated with surfer
culture has become like, way mainstream, used to create dudes in popular media
that are like, pure bogus man. The stereotype has gone with the flow, and the
lingo is now affected not just to invoke surfer culture, but generally dudes
portrayed as having, like, presumably low levels of intelligence (Fought, 113).
The portrayal of the Southern California dude and the Valley girl in modern
media, and as a result, their affected sociolect, are of most righteous interest to
the linguist.

Subject of Analysis
The video sources and fictional characters chosen for this most righteous
analysis are:
- Crush the Turtle, Finding Nemo (2003).
- Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan, Bill and Teds Excellent
Adventure (1989).
- A series of interviews with author William Safire, Band Surf Punks, and
several individuals fulfilling the Valley Girl stereotype on the topic of
slang, presented by news anchor Robert Macneil circa 1980.

Dude
The most commonly noted feature is the multiform use of the word dude,
which was like, initially a noun dating back to like, the 1800s or whatever (Hill,
321), before it became adopted by surfer culture. It gradually came to mean a
male person across all subcultural and socioeconomic lines (Hill, 324), and
from there became an exclamation of delight (Hill, 325). Richard Hill notes that
these meanings are rarely expressed in tandem (325) to avoid confusion. This
seems to intentionally fade away to like, characterise the otherness of surfer
speech in comedy. The intentional quality of confusion given by the tandem use
of the homonym rings of Synthetic slang, a term coined by Wentworth and
Flexner (1960) to refers to slang created (often for comic effect) by writers, but
not applied in the demographic to which it is attributed. The dudes Crush, Bill,
and Ted, are regular violators of this unspoken code, creating multiple chains of
dudes in their respective films, of both exclamation and noun form. This
adaptation of confusion to surfer lingo is of particular interest, as this is like,
demonstrative of Hollywood not only exploiting the stereotype, but their
presence being instrumental in constructing the stereotype itself for others to
tap into, man.

Repetition as like, a Construction of Intelligence

The Hollywood representation of California/surfer lingo seems to imply that a
limited vocabulary is a feature of the dialect, rather than a deficit. While the

1
lexis was highly creative, innovations were in fact limited to specific semantic
fields salient to male youths (Mesthrie 173), naturally centred on the activity of
surfing, and a disproportionate amount of synonyms for cool. The sample of
the Surf Punks putting surf talk (1:22) into their music demonstrates both of
these features, with intentional oversaturation of the words like, and radical,
followed by the plethora of totally tubular synonyms displayed in Valley girlese
(SURF PUNKS, 4:32). Bill and Teds vocabulary, however, is clearly constructed to
reflect a poor intelligence, as an embodiment of the stereotype. The word
totally appears only 12 times in the film, but when it does it occurs several
times within a few lines, creating the impression of repetition and therefore lack
of originality. As discussed above, the word dude has become such a
ubiquitous filler word and expression of general expression, man, that it is no
surprise to see it used 70 times over the course of the film. Similarly, Crush uses
the phrase like, woah three times in his first three sentences, and the word
dude six in the same space.

Totally Righteous Phonology and Construction

One notices in all the extracts, the extension and corresponding centralisation
of the vowel. In the Finding Nemo extract, when Marlin says dude (3:32), one
notices it sounds uncharacteristically odd. He pronounces it as /dud/, clearly a
kook, whereas Crushs is closer to /d:d/. You can hear the same characteristic
extension in Bill and Teds repertoire, especially in the word totally as
affirmative (as opposed to adjective), resulting in /t tli/, as opposed to /ttli/.
The Surf Punks inflect this centralisation on many words, seeming to exaggerate
this feature, notably the words tunes and tube, while the same feature
becomes distinctly less obvious outside of their singing. It would appear that
these dudes knew what image they are striving to project, before these
impressions became mainstream caricatures.
Chaining refers to the practice of creating run on sentences (Matthews, 58) by
means of multiple coordinations and subordinations, effectively chaining
together multiple ideas that could easily have been separated by separate
sentences. Crush demonstrates himself as a part of surfer culture immediately
by means of this, with First you were like, 'whoa!', and then we were all like,
'whoa!', and then you were like, 'whoa'. (0:33), using the same ambiguous
repetition as in synthetic slang. Like is used to the same conjunctive effect in
the song thats like, playing in the background of the valley girls interview (Surf
Punks 4:05), the eponymous Valley Girl by Moon Unit Zappa.

Conclusion
William Safire condescendingly concluded his interview by comparing the
valley girl sociolect to streakers in language (4:50), declaring that it was a
phase that would never last. However, from the sincere explanations in the
valley girls interview of words that seem almost commonplace in the modern
era, such as awesome (3:06) and totally (3:20) it becomes obvious, even to
the average dude, that many terms from surfer culture have become
permanently incorporated into the most bodacious vocabulary of the global
community, transcending both phase and stereotype.
Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes.

2
Bibliography

Fought, Carmen. California Students Perceptions of, You Know, Regions and Dialects? Handbook
of Perceptual Dialectology. Vol. 2. (2002): 113 John Benjamins Publishing

Hill, Richard A. "You've Come a Long Way, Dude: A History." American Speech 69.3 (1994): 321-327.

Matthews, Peter Hugoe. The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Mesthrie, Rajend. "English tsotsitaals? an analysis of two written texts in Surfspeak and South
African Indian English slang." Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 32.2 (2014):
173-183.

Wahl, Alexander R. "Dude, we like totally rock: Mediated African Performances of California
Linguistic."

Wentworth, Harold, and Stuart Berg Flexner. "Dictionary of American Slang (New York,
1960)." Wentworth238Dictionary of American Slang1960: 238.

Videography

Bill & Ted's excellent adventure. Dir. Stephen Herek. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and George
Carlin. 1989. FreeFilms.org. Web. http://ffilms.org/bill-teds-excellent-adventure-1989/

Finding Nemo. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Perf. Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, and Alexander Gould.
Pixar Animation Studios, 2003. Web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJEDtKnghIY

MacNeil, Robert. SURF PUNKS Valley Girl Slang. Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=pZsLPdVfir0

3
Appendix 1
Glossary of slang terms used

Awesome Righteous
Bodacious Having the quality of body, admirable
Bogus erroneous, false
Cool - sick
Dude an individual, traditionally male, but commonly unisex now.
Epic awesome
Heinous Uncool
Hollywood not California/surf culture exclusive, but general term for any film
production company
Kook greenhorn, inexperienced
Like filler word, indicating pause and allows for easier chaining
Lingo Language, dialect
Man a filler word
Sick epic
Uncool not respectable or acceptable
Wassup - Greeting
Way very
Pure very
Righteous justified, cool