Adventures of Slangman

By Bob Baker

Sept. 29, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

David Burke had spent three decades devoting himself to an overlooked niche of the English language. And now, visiting a UCLA Extension classroom, he stood before a dozen students from Japan, Switzerland, Italy and Thailand. He’d coached them on how to respond, but could they do it on their own?

“The Pacific Ocean,” Burke proclaimed, “has a lot of water.”

The students’ response came in unison, perfectly stretching the one-syllable retort into two, the vocal pitch rising, then falling, to indicate the appropriate level of contempt:

“Duuh-uh!”

Burke beamed. This is why he calls himself Slangman, a self-styled superhero to masses of foreigners who’ve grasped the formalities of American English but not the catchphrases that, you know, grease the skids.

When Slangman rescues you, he does it by showing you the difference between OT, OK and OJ. Or between ATM, CEO and AOL. He explains “dork,” “bigwig,” “stop on a dime” and “pound the pavement.” He even shows you how to avoid inadvertent insults in the bedroom.

Burke, 46, began morphing into Slangman as a teenager when he found his serviceable French sabotaged during a summer trip to Paris. He’s written more than 25 books on slang, the last 13 on American slang for nonnatives. He’s made himself a fixture on Voice of America and is constantly hustling to expand his reach.

“I don’t want nonnative speakers to go through what I went through in France,” says Burke, a gregarious, boyish-looking fellow who was raised in the San Fernando Valley and now lives in Hollywood, where he was born. “You feel like all your study is invalidated.”

Burke’s guides range from multiple volumes of “Biz Speak” and “Street Speak” for American tourists in France, Spain and Italy to a guide on “Dirty English” for new arrivals in America. His collections are less complete than the 640-page Dictionary of American Slang but offer more context, like this entry from “The Slangman Guide to Street Speak 3: The Complete Course in American Slang & Idioms”:

Example: Our new biology professor is da bomb!

Translation: Our new biology professor is fantastic!

“Real Speak”: ‘Ar new bio’ prof’s da bomb!

Note 1: ... Because this expression first appeared in rap music, which was originated by African Americans who commonly perform rap music with this type of accent, the accent remained as an important part of the word itself.

Note 2: This expression is not to be confused with the expression a bomb, which means “the worst.” For example: That movie was a bomb!

Burke, who was trained as a classical pianist and worked for a while as a TV actor, brings a showbiz gloss to his trade. On Voice of America, where he makes monthly appearances, he sometimes explains slang by reading mock slang-filled letters from his mother. Sometimes he rewrites fables -- like the time he converted “Jack and the Beanstalk” into a tutorial on food slang. (The fact that Jack’s cow wouldn’t produce milk left the family in a pickle. When his mother heard Jack had sold it, she went bananas.)

Andrew Freund, the UCLA Extension teacher who invited Burke to his classroom, says he’s used Slangman guides for several years. (Several students clustered around Burke after his lecture, asking him to autograph their texts.) Ninety percent of the nonnative English speakers who take Freund’s courses at UCLA Extension have had eight to 12 years of English in their home countries, “but you mention a few words of slang and they don’t have any idea how to respond,” he said. “Some students who do so well on tests don’t have the faintest idea how to comprehend average Americans on the streets.” Burke’s materials “are really a step up beyond the standard idiom/slang books that are out there.”

A new arrival’s ignorance of slang has been known to trigger a violent encounter. One of the worst occurred in 1992 in Baton Rouge, La., when a teenage Japanese exchange student was killed after he mistakenly turned up at the wrong house for a Halloween party. The homeowner, holding a gun, ordered the student to “freeze,” but the teen apparently mistook that for an invitation to come in, and he dashed toward the door, where the homeowner shot him.

Within eight months, the Japanese government had begun giving travel agents pamphlets explaining American phrases such as “get your hands up,” “look out” and “duck.” A few years later, Lonely Planet published its “USA Phrasebook,” designed for foreign visitors who spoke English but were clueless in the face of slang like “crotch rockets” (motorcycles) and “Bible Belt” and phrases like “I need my space.”

Burke began thinking about more elaborate slang guides in the early 1970s as a 15-year-old North Hollywood High School student whose grandparents had emigrated from Poland and Hungary and were fluent in Polish, Russian, German, French, Czech, Yiddish, Hungarian and English.

His confidence in the French he’d spoken with his father was shattered that year when he visited Paris. He couldn’t make out the slang being used by his French host family. During one meal, he said, somebody mentioned a friend with a big blair. What did that mean? Burke asked. Big nose, they told him, and then they listed all the other ways of saying “nose” he’d never heard of: tarrin, patate, pif.... Soon, Burke said, he was making lists, and he returned home with hundreds of examples. He fashioned a thesaurus of French slang for Americans and, by his count, was rejected by publishers 156 times over the next 15 years.

During those years he struggled to figure out what to do with his life. He changed majors repeatedly at San Diego State, then fell into a series of jobs ranging from a tour guide at Universal Studios to a composing job at a TV-film production company to several public-relations and music posts with the 1984 Olympics Committee to an acting stint on the TV show “Eight Is Enough.”

Finally, in 1987, when Burke was 30, the publisher John Wiley & Sons bought his book on French slang, which led to 12 more on French and Spanish slang that sold 300,000 copies. When Wiley turned down Burke’s proposal for American slang books for foreigners, he decided to self-publish. The first “Street Speak” guide came out in 1991, and Burke says he has sold 200,000 copies of 13 self-published volumes.

The market is formidable. By various estimates, there are 200 million to 375 million people who speak English as a second language, compared with about 375 million native English speakers. About 90 million of those nonnative English speakers listen to Voice of America, the broadcast arm of the United States, which sought out Burke five years ago to help listeners with slang.

The VOA appearances draw listeners to Burke’s Web site (www.slangman.com), producing compliments and questions: The Vietnamese teenager in her sixth year of English who was stuck on the meaning of “big deal.” The Albanian immigrant who e-mailed him, “well done, mate.” The college student in China’s Sichuan province boasting that her American visitors were “shocked” when she used slang. The listener from Kazakhstan wrestling with the phrase “baby boomer attitude.” And the Iranian teacher who was desperate for a reference book to help him understand American movies. “Every word I read in the ‘Street Talk’ books fill me with such joy,” the teacher wrote, “or, as you say, ‘I get a real kick.’ ”

“That’s a tremendous feeling,” Burke says, “when I get an e-mail saying, ‘You’ve changed my experience. I don’t feel like an outsider anymore.’ ”

The narrowness of Burke’s work leaves language scholars ambivalent. Slang is usually an “ancillary part” of language instruction, says USC professor Mario Saltarelli, whose specialties include Spanish, Italian and linguistics. “We add some colloquial expressions, but we don’t call it slang. ‘Slang’ has negative connotations.” Another USC linguistics professor, Audrey Li, says simple slang is far less valuable than idiomatic expressions such as “he hit the ceiling” or “pay attention to....”

Burke, whose books are generally divided between slang and idioms, feels that conventional instruction overlooks the density of slang in American conversation. “I heard a teacher once who got frustrated and said, ‘How come you guys don’t get it?’ And right there, that’s three slang expressions in one sentence.”

Promotional ideas spill from him almost hourly. He’d love to write a column for English-language newspapers that target the foreign-born; he’d like to cut a deal with CNN International; he’d like an international airline to show his videotaped advice on customs and slang before landing in America; he’d like to produce his own Voice of America show; he’d like to broker his own American slang show on Japanese TV.

“I was brought up with a sensitivity for nonnative speakers, and because of that I listen all the time with the ear of a nonnative,” he says. “If somebody says, ‘Get me a pizza and step on it,’ I know exactly how that sounds to someone” from another country.

In his recent appearance before the UCLA Extension class, he stumped the students by showing how some American expressions are continually abbreviated almost beyond recognition.

Nobody says “I do not know,” he said. “It’s reduced to ‘I don’t know.’ And then it gets worse. We have ‘I dunno.’ And have you seen this one?” He wrote it on the board: “Ow know.” Then reduced it again, and wrote “Uh-hhhh,” which he explained meant the same thing but had to be spoken with a shrug of the shoulders. He flicked a finger up and down to demonstrate the tone of pronunciation, then asked:

“What is the chemical composition of the moon?”

“Uh-hhhh,” the students answered with a collective shrug.

And once again, Slangman beamed.