There Will Always Be a Blingland

Oi, chillax. Don’t go splashing your bust a grape mozzarella on Britneys, hench — pick up two new nang Richard Snaries. The dope Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang is dropped on Nov. 17. Five days later hail the buttery New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.

Flummoxed? Unless you happen to be a British teenager, it will take you a brow-furrowing few seconds to translate that into the Queen’s English. If you want some help, click here or holler for your kids.

Many teens in the U.K. have a fluent command of Blinglish, a melding of West Indian and English street slang, enriched by borrowings from black urban America and Grime, a form of London hip-hop. It’s spoken in schools and clubs, on street corners and all over the Internet — anywhere, in fact, where kids enjoy mastering a language that excludes parents and other authority figures.

Until now. The two dictionaries cited above unlock some of the secrets of the new lingo, as well as providing glossaries of longer established slang. “The chief components of slang are sex, money and intoxicants,” says Jonathon Green, who compiled the latest Cassell’s. It used to take years for such words to enter the lexicon, he adds, but “through hip-hop and the Internet, words travel so fast that white middle-class boys and girls in London are talking like black kids in the ghettos of Harlem and Compton.”

The speed with which Blinglish expressions are coined may signal disappointment for bofs (old people) trying to decode youthspeak. Brap (cool) and wix (wicked, as in good, but even cooler) these dictionaries may be, but they’re already old school.