A man walked up to me the other day and said, "Hey bro", you listen to rap music?" I replied with a yes; the man then tried to sell me his CD, but being the broke college student I am I had no cash on me. Once I told him this he replied with, "Fo" shizle". So of course I replied back to him with "Fo" shizle my nizle" not knowing what this means. This makes it apparent that this is a different kind of slang; it's a totally different language. The role of language in popular culture has changed over the past few decades, and it will keep on changing.
Every different culture has a different way the talk, and a different way they describe experiences or other things. For example, someone from England would say they took the lift up to my sixth floor apartment, when I would say that I took the elevator up. Also, my girl friend that is originally from Philadelphia calls what we call sprinkles jimmies. Many people have never heard them called that before, but being around parents who are from back east (Chicago and Brooklyn) I have heard of sprinkles being called jimmies before. So people from the eastern part of the country have different words and accents then people who are from the south, Midwest or even the West coast. Also some groups of friends have their own words for things or some even make up almost entire languages. For example, in my group of friends they call me Billy when my real name is Ryan. How do you get Billy from Ryan you ask? I have that answer down to a science from all the different people who have asked me over the years. It spread so fast that everyone in my dorm last year started calling me Billy; some people even thought that was my real name. In my group of friends we also use words like riff raff, Boogle, Ranada, and other random words that we don't use when we are outside of the group. Each of these words means different things. We also have specialized hand shakes that only people in our group of friends know how to do.
