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From Oxford University Press Catalog


Slayer Slang: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and American English
Author - Michael Adams
June 2003, Oxford University Press

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Slayer Slang
A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon
MICHAEL ADAMS

Have a question about slang and youth culture? Just ask a vampire slayer

In its seven years on television, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has earned critical acclaim and a massive cult following among teen viewers. One of the most distinguishing features of the program is the innovative way the show's writers play with language: fabricating new words, morphing existing ones, and throwing usage on its head. The result has been a strikingly resonant lexicon that reflects the power of both youth culture and television in the evolution of American slang. Using the show to illustrate how new slang is formed, transformed, and transmitted, Slayer Slang is one of those rare books that combines a serious explanation of a pop culture phenomena with an engrossing read for fans of the show, word geeks, and language professionals. Michael Adams begins his book with a synopsis of the program's history and a defense of ephemeral language. He then moves to the main body of the work: a detailed glossary of slayer slang, annotated with actual dialogue and recorded the style accepted by the American Dialect Society. The book concludes with a bibliography and a lengthy index, a guide to sources (novels based on the show, magazine articles about the show, and language culled from the official posting board) and an appendix of slang-making suffixes. Introduced by Jane Espenson, one of the show's most inventive writers (and herself a linguist), Slayer Slang offers a quintessential example of contemporary youth culture serving as a vehicle for slang.
In the tradition of The Physics of Star Trek, Slayer Slang is one of those rare books that offers a serious examination a TV cult phenemenon appealing to fans and thinkers alike.

A few examples from the Slayer Slang glossary:

bitca n [AHD4 bitch n in sense 2.a + a] Bitch 1997 Sep 15 Whedon When She Was Bad "[Willow:] 'I mean, why else would she be acting like such a b-i-t-c-h?' [Giles:] 'Willow, I think we're all a little old to be spelling things out.' [Xander:] 'A bitca?'"

break and enterish adj [AHD4 sv breaking and entering n + -ish suff in sense 2.a] Suitable for crime 1999 Mar 16 Petrie Enemies "I'll go home and stock up on weapons, slip into something a little more break and enterish."

carbon-dated adj [fr. AHD4 carbondating + -ed] Very out of date 1997 Mar 10 Whedon Welcome to the Hellmouth "[Buffy:] 'Deal with that outfit for a moment.' [Giles:] 'It's dated?' [Buffy:] 'It's carbon-dated.'"

cuddle-monkey n [AHD4 cuddle v + monkey n in sense 2, by analogy fr. RHHDAS (also DAS3 and NTC) sv cuddle bunny 'an affectionate, passionate, or sexually attractive young woman'] Male lover 1998 Feb 10 Noxon Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered "Every woman in Sunnydale wants to make me her cuddle-monkey."

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from BBC Online

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Buffy News 21 April 2003
Buffy's book end?


American newspaper USA Today caused confusion yesterday, by claiming that Simon and Schuster's range of Buffy books were to end in May.

"Simon Schuster will release its final Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel to coincide with the show's last airing on May 20," their web site announced.

We checked with Simon and Schuster UK, who suspect the paper got confused by news that they are rush-releasing a novelisation of all of season seven in June.

The ambitious tome will attempt to cram all 22 episodes into 600 pages - that's an astonishing 27 pages per episodes by our calculations!

As for the claim that the novels are to cease, Simon and Schuster UK confirmed that novels are scheduled for at least the rest of year, and that they have no knowledge of the range coming to an end.

The 95-book TV tie-in series has sold more than 4.6 million copies since 1997.

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BBC Online spoke with Ashley McConnell and Dori Koogler, authors of the Willow/Spike centric Buffy novel, These Our Actors:



How did you get involved in writing These Our Actors together?

Dori: Ashley said to me one day, "You're going to write a Buffy book with me." We've known each other for years, and she's always encouraged my writing. And by 'encouraged' I mean in that firm, boot-meets-backside way.

[It's] a good thing, because left to my own devices, I'd still be scribbling soppy story fragments in school notebooks and not showing them to anybody.

I think she finally got tired of my shilly-shallying about whether or not I wanted to write. She decided I was ready, dragged me up there onto the High Diving Board, and gave me a push. I was terrified, but I found out that I really enjoyed writing the book, and want to do it again. So I'm terribly grateful, even if that long fall to the water was a bit of a shock...

Ashley: It seemed like a good idea at the time. I've had an image in my head ever since I was an undergraduate of sitting in an empty theatre and watching the characters sitting in the audience talking to each other.

And Dori's getting a double Masters in Theatre, so it was an opportunity to do something with that image and maybe have some fun with Spike while we were at it.



Did you get any feedback from Joss and co. about expanding upon the events in Fool for Love? Did anyone at Pocket Books or Fox get twitchy about all the new TV continuity regarding Cecily?

Dori: We got feedback from Fox, who license Buffy, but there wasn't really any contact with Joss and Mutant Enemy. The only thing they really told us was that Spike had to be evil, and we couldn't give him a last name.

We'd already plotted out the book when we heard the Cecily rumours, and I figured we were Jossed for sure, but nobody said anything to us about it. The novels are technically Alternate Universe stories, anyway, so that gave us a little leeway.

Ashley: I don't think Joss Whedon is as involved in the books - where would he find the time? Which is a shame, really, because wouldn't that have been a kick! I think it might also have resolved a couple of minor issues a bit better, but that's water under the bridge.

I wasn't worried about the is-Halfrek-really-Cecily question. They never gave a definitive answer to that, and there are dozens of ways the two of them could have run across each other.


Did one of you write the historical passages and the other the modern ones, or did you fully cross-collaborate on the novel?

Dori: I wrote most of the historical passages, and Ashley did most of the present-day scenes. Of course, we each wrote bits in each other's sections; for instance, that wonderful bit from the party in Fool For Love was Ashley, and the stairwell scene with Spike and Willow was me.

But we had talked extensively about how the two plots would intertwine, how they influenced each other.

Ashley: There are places where we know Dori did some things and I did some things, and there are some passages in there where neither one of us can figure out for the life of us who wrote it. Which is kinda neat.


It's not often that a novel sidelines Buffy. Was there resistance to this, and do you think the Buffy novels should be experimenting in this way more?

Dori: One of the most frequent notes we got was, "Where's Buffy? We haven't seen her in X number of pages now..."

I really like stories that focus on characters that aren't Buffy. We see her story in the show, and it's interesting to me to see how the other characters are dealing with everything that's going on in Sunnydale. I loved The Zeppo, for instance.

What I'd really love to see is a book that deals with Buffy and the Scoobies only peripherally - because Life In Sunnydale has to be interesting if you're a cop or an EMT. How do these people, in particular, cope with the Hellmouthy weirdness they've got to be seeing every day?

Is it unusual to see cartons of blood in the refrigerators at 7-Eleven? How to the Emergency Room doctors and nurses deal with 'neck ruptures,' and what do the coroners do to keep the customers from rising from their coffins and eating them before the funerals? Is there some kind of unspoken admiration for people with bite scars because they survived?

Ashley: Oh, that would be cool. I doubt they'd go for it, though. "They're Buffy books, after all."

Which is why I'm a little confused about why they cut out a bit I had at the very beginning with Willow and Buffy - the conversation they had where Buffy tells Willow she's dropping the drama class.

That was one of the problems with the book, by the way - they want more or less parallel continuity with the show, but at the same time the production schedule on a book is such that if you write a proposal in October, and go through the process of getting it approved by the editor, approved by the studio, go to contract, write the book, get the changes, make the changes, get the copyedit (which we didn't get, unfortunately), get the galleys [a simply bound, rough version of the final book], proof the galleys, get the book finally into print - you're miles behind the show. You're miles behind the show from the time you write the proposal until it gets approved. It's a no-win situation.

It would be better, I think, if they did do more alternate-universe type things or Life in Sunnydale type things. But they feel that they're selling the show, and that's not the show, so there you are.



Did either of you appear in school plays, and if so, what was your favourite memory of them?

Dori: Oh, I was practically a theatre major at university - I took classes, I did shows every semester, but I never did declare a drama major. I think my favorite memory is playing the wife in To Be Continued... She doesn't even appear until the third act, but by the time she comes on, she's been built up so much that I got lots of gasps from the audience.

I was always much better at acting than doing tech work, but I did costumes and props and lights, a little of everything.

Ashley: I did a couple of plays in high school, and my freshman year at university I practically lived in the theatre, painting flats, making paper flowers for props, anything anybody needed. But then I declared an anthropology major, and spent less time behind the stage.

I was very very lucky, though, to have a terrific teacher, Dr. Tom Erhard, who was at that time in the English Department. I took Modern American Drama, Modern European Drama, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Drama, and Early European Drama classes from Tom. He was the first teacher who would let me write exactly what I thought and actually enjoyed reading it. I owe Tom any success I've ever had as a writer, because he let me fly.

Years after I graduated, I discovered that he was leading theatre tours to London. So I've gone on four three-and-a-half-week theatre tours. On one trip I think I saw something like eighteen plays. I love London theatre. I want to go back!



To what extent did your theatre experiences influence the novel?

Dori: I've been doing community theatre since I graduated from university. It's how I met my husband, actually - we met at auditions for the first show I was cast in, worked on shows together for the next six months, and when I came to rehearsal wearing an engagement ring one night, people were amazed because I hadn't had time to date anyone. I'm still working with our community theatre here, mostly acting. I usually play character roles, and have had some swell roles in Ray Sharkey shows.

TSheatre is just something so ingrained in my life that it seemed natural to include it in the book.


Who did you find to be the most interesting character to write for?

Dori: I'm sure there are people out there who will be shocked and amazed to find this out, but... it was Darla. She's just so... snarky. Especially in her scenes with Spike; I really got to unleash my Inner Bitca when I was writing the two of them.

Ashley: I just cracked up reading Dori's take on Darla. I absolutely loved it. I think she really nailed her - so to speak!

I enjoyed writing Willow, but I think I'd like to tackle- er, write more for - Giles.


What are your thoughts on the way Spike has evolved as a character over the years?

Dori: How much space have you got...?

I've been a huge Spike fan since School Hard. I knew from What's My Line 2 that this vamp was extraordinary; he could do something no other vampire was capable of, according to the rules of the Buffyverse - love selflessly.

In the scene where Spike brings Angel to Drusilla, the seeds for what we saw all through the last couple of seasons are tossed out in a split-second series of expressions on James Marsters' face - hurt to jealousy to understanding what she needed and being okay with it. I was completely blown away by that tiny moment, and I've been extremely happy with where they've taken Spike as a character, because I saw that potential in him from the beginning.

I adore stories about the redemptive power of love. Watching Spike struggle over the last few seasons to change himself when everything he knew, everyone around him, all his hundred and some years of experience with vampires told him it was impossible, hopeless, doomed, that he could never rise above his vampire nature, and then watching him do just that... Well, wow!

Of course, there are fans out there who think that Spike can never make up for all the bloodshed and horror and evil - and they're right. He can't make up for any of the things he's done, he can't bring those people back.

But I don't see redemption as a destination so much as a journey, and I believe Spike has been on that journey since Intervention. I believe that Spike's struggle toward redemption in the face of impossible odds is the important thing, that he keeps trying to make himself into something new. His love for Buffy is carving him out from the inside, changing his interior shape, and he's not going to be able to go back to being the same Big Bad he was before he loved her.

Ashley: Spike's an interesting contrast to Angel, and maybe some of it is due to the fact that the actor didn't know what they were going to throw at him as backstory! You really have to wonder how much of Spike is the inner William and how much is the demon? I think we're getting to see that now.

Marsters has gotten to play so many different characters in this one character, and find ways to connect them all, knit them all into one coherent image - it's just a treasure trove.

Dori and I don't always agree about Spike, either. I don't think he's necessarily been trying to change to make up for anything. He knows that what he did was wrong, but he was all right with it while he was doing it. The only reason he wanted to stop doing it was because it made Buffy reject him, not because he thought it was bad. He didn't have a soul, and I suspect that in this context "soul" kind of equates to "conscience."

But now we've got a new twist on it. With Season Seven he's got his soul back, and he's hearing the voices of the dead, and it's driving him crazy. And we're seeing a new Spike, a more mature one (at least in his moments of sanity, which I think are more than we've been shown). He's hearing voices, but the voices are real, after all.



Is a series of novels entirely set around the early days of Spike, Dru, Angelus and Darla something you'd be interested in developing?

Dori: Oh, I'd definitely be interested in that! I had so much fun writing Darla, and I'd love to have an opportunity to look at the relationship between the four of them again. Somehow I can see them in the Old West in the late 1800's, maybe in a Montana frontier mining town.

Darla would hate that, all the mud and dust and lack of nice things, and it'd just be so much fun to see how they'd ended up there, what drove them to hide out in such an isolated locale. I'd also love to have them show up in India during the British colonisation.

Ashley: There are limits to what you can do with Spike, because he's pretty young. You can't take any of them much farther back than the eighteenth century or so. But there are possibilities, yes there are. Vampires at Gettysburg... Hmmmmmm.

Golden and Sniegoski's comic adaptation of their upcoming Buffy videogame, Chaos Bleeds, is now available at PowerStar Collectibles


2 covers but this one is coolest cuz they all have the cutest button noses!

Part one of Ring of Fire is now available for viewing at BBC Online. Part two online July 31th and part three, Aug 8th.

Written by Doug Petrie (The Yoko Factor) and inked by Ryan Sook and Tim Goodyear.


Ha. Dru in samuri headgear...too funny.