Pen-Elayne on the Web

Catching Some Z's

So this subway ad catches my eye, it's for some tooth whitening/breath freshening product, and you see the lower halves (from the nose downward) of two faces - a black guy on the left and a white gal on the right. And their teeth gleam and all that. And the woman's licking her teeth or lips or whatever, can't have a guy doing that because, well, woman=sex and guy=consumer of sex or something. And there are two word balloons, each leading to the mouth/teeth in question, presumably commenting on how their mouths feel. And the one connected to the white gal says "Va Voom!" And the one connected to the black guy says "Fa Shizzle!"

"Fa Shizzle"????

As my husband says, "Isn't that Yiddish or something?" "Hey Kenye, fa shizzle iz nischt galantzedich! Iz nischt! Geschluffen!"

More and more, the older I get, it's like, "It's just me, isn't it?" I totally can't keep up with "the new lingo" or "that wacky slang those crazy kids all use, daddy-o." I'm still struggling with the difference between the adjectives "pants" and "ass" - I keep forgetting which one means "that's great" and which one means "that sucks." Heck, I'm not even past "phat" and "da bomb" yet, and it'll be years before "I'd hit it" makes any sense to me, even though I believe I've already used it in the correct context upon a number of occasions. ('Cause, you know, as long as Hugh Jackman is out there, I probably would hit it.) But gah - I mean, "bling bling" and "in da hizzouse" and "it's da shiznit" and all the other just-add-a-Z stuff, it's about as foreign to me as Spa Fon Squa Tront would be to a non-comics geek or common courtesy to my upstairs neighbors (yeah, they're busy dragging furniture across their bare floors again). And I feel particularly clueless when a friggin' subway advertisement gets there ahead of me.

Beyond that, of course, is the fact that "Va Voom" (which I suppose the viewer is also supposed to subconsciously associate with the woman herself) is even more of an old-fashioned expression than I'm wont to use, so I wonder if that ad is designed to subtly reinforce a feeling of "this woman is old and busted, this man is new hotness." See, I'm using The Lingo again. It's just sad, innit...