Emo Atyachar

Not everything that begins with an ‘I’ must be a sleek white gadget. Ask 15-year-old schoolboy Namith Boppana who likes to call his index finger an ‘iFinger’. He protects it devoutly from the grease of chappatis, the cream of squishy pastries and the salty residue of wafers. After all, he belongs to a generation of croaky voices and seedy moustaches that feel the need to wield such a finger: For the sole purpose of using touchscreen devices.So these fingers now have a name.
iFinger is one of the many neologisms being invented, popularized and trashed every day by the fountainheads of a religion called Teenglish. The perpetrators of this language could be hiding in school uniforms, donning torn jeans or eating at a mall near you.
Teenglish has evolved substantially from the days of ‘PAW’ (parents are watching) and now encompasses such words as ATM (at the moment), crunk (crazy drunk), frape (‘Facebook rape’ for maligning), e-dump (electronic heart burn), DTR (define the relationship), emo (emotional) and overchicked (a boy who dates a very pretty girl).
The cryptic lure of Teenglish even inspired a book called ‘Pimp Up Your Vocab’ to help parents and teachers negotiate the mystic of this language.
While Teenglish draws heavily from American television shows like How I Met Your Mother (which immortalized the idea of a ‘wingman’) and The Big Bang Theory (credited with ‘bazzinga’), Indian-English slang on shows like Roadies and Big Switch spawns an impressive following. Shirisha Athawale, a 17-year-old from Prabhadevi, says that with more students pursuing studies abroad, a wave of new words is hitting Indian shores. “I didn’t know words like ‘crunk’ and ‘cheddar’ till my friend studying in the US started using them. Sometimes we just use these as code to keep our parents away,” she confesses.
For Rhea Gupta, a 18-yearold first-year college student, social networking sites are fertile breeding ground for Teenglish. “Someone will tweet a new word and it will spread like a virus among my friends. It’s entertaining to keep up with them,” she says.
But parents such as Suchita Shetty, who have spent the better part of their parenthood trying to decode their offspring, have started incorporating Teenglish words to communicate with their children.