Entry tags:

high school, linguistics

highschool vernacular

When I was in grade ten, I was taking a beginner dance class as one of my credits (art school, right). The strange thing about this class was that it included many girls I had never met before -- this turned out to be a result of their tendency to take applied level classes (while I took academic). Possibly they planned to attend college, but I was given the impression that it was a strategy for avoiding difficult homework. (Not that they were lazier than I was -- I wasn't really into homework either ... I just wasn't willing to base on laziness decisions that would affect my future quite so drastically).

Anyway. These girls spoke differently from how I spoke. They had slang words and phrases that I was unfamiliar with (and not terribly fond of). One such word was custy, an adjective meaning 'gross, unlikeable' -- often used when they were talking about women they had distaste for. When it was used as a noun, it would undergo zero derivation: custy, (pl. custies) -- here it was used slightly differently, between friends ("Let's get going, custies.")

My friend Hendrik hypothesized its origin -- disgust. Often, notice, pronounced /dɪˈskʌst/ (di-skuhst): they were clipping the word and endowing it with a different derivation pattern.

lex. category	standard eng.	vernacular
v.	disgust	---
adj.	disgusting	custy
noun.	---	custy

They were also keeping the devoiced velar stop /k/, not reverting to the original /g/ which had become devoiced as a condition of its environment (after the /s/).

Which brings me to my next observation -- I didn't think about it much at the time, but the gust part of disgust is associated with taste, enjoyment, gusto. Strange that it should have come so far from that meaning.