Pimp my Academy

The best thing about Three 6 Mafia winning an Oscar for Best Song is the likelihood of "pimp" losing its luster of hipness.

That’s the opening line to Jabari Asim’s column in yesterday’s Post, and it’s absolutely right. But Asim shows he’s not quite hip to the lingo himself when he goes on to say that,

While the prospect of previously oblivious whites adopting the word is a nauseating probability, the mainstreaming of "pimp" should reduce its popularity in the black communities where it first shucked its cobwebs and regained its currency. Its anticipated lapse in popularity creates an opportunity to suggest new lingo to my fellow African-American city dwellers, who often originate the nation's catchiest slang.

Seeing as how I’m now blissfully removed from those honored institutions of beer helmets and Abercrombie shorts in which so much party slang is developed and discarded each year (we ought to find some way to recycle old slang, by the way--think of all the waste!), I’m not entirely sure whether it’s still in current use. However, for an annoyingly long time the word “pimp” was the beach-volleyball sets favored replacement for “cool.” Generally it was used to describe items or ideas:

The party last night was totally pimp.

His new swimming pool was mad pimp.

The grill we cooked our burgers on was pimped out.

Etc. Slang isn’t a creature that bends to anyone’s will (except maybe Mike Myers, who, between Austin Powers and Wayne’s World, seems to have a virtual lock on funny but grossly overused catchphrases), but this always seemed to me to be one of the more heinous linguistic developments to come out of those perpetual verbal experimenters living in frat and sorority houses everywhere.

The word’s use has probably died off some, though the popularity of rapper XZibit’s mildly amusing ghetto-fantasy car makeover show “Pimp My Ride” (on, where else, MTV) hasn’t helped it to wither, but slang, which is essentially rhetorical fashion, has a tendency to lose its luster when commercialized and popularized. Really, there’s not much that’s less, er, “pimp,” than winning an Oscar.