POP-CULTURE SPEAK? DON'T EVEN GO THERE!; MODERN LANGUAGE BECOMING COMMUNICATIONS WASTELAND OF BUZZWORDS, SLOGANS, LABELS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

As if, dude! You say the English language is dead? That it's been hijacked by Beavis and Bart?

Well, duh! Like, we all should be talking like Jane Austen or something instead of ``Seinfeld''?

Hello?! What was that crack about ``cultural illiteracy''? ``South Park''? Don't even go there!

Anyway. Whatever. Yada, yada, yada.

In case it has escaped your 15-second attention span, America is now officially a bilingual nation.

There's still boring old English, of course, all 2 million superfluous words of it, however painfully they're misspoken or misspelled.

Then there's something we'll call pop-cult speak: a drive-by vernacular of movie dialogue, corporate lingo, rap lyrics, sitcom one-liners, Internet jargon, pop psychology, surfer slang, Howard Stern-isms and pithy slogans for overpriced sneakers.

Yes, you can forget those tiresome old divisions of male vs. female, gay vs. straight, young vs. old, Clinton vs. Starr, or Right Coast vs. Left. Today our society is rapidly being split between those who are clued into the catch-phrase industry and the rhetoric of consumption - Just charge it! - and those who insist on speaking and thinking in clauses, prepositional phrases, Shakespearean references and other quaint anachronisms.

Yo, Shakespeare! Yo, Dante! We've been there, done that.

Today's communication is about brevity, hipness and, above all, speed. It's the verbal equivalent of cyberspace's point-and-click.

``I think language was a lot more colorful in the past and now it's just kind of utilitarian,'' says Dr. Carole Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who has served as a consultant for more than 100 TV shows and films. ``Now we're all communicating like cavemen.''

All-righty then, as Ace Ventura so eloquently put it.

Perhaps Lieberman is overstating the point, but speech is definitely shrinking. In the '90s, Wayne and Garth taught us how to first-strike useless paragraphs with a single preemptive ``Not!'' Why bother with sentences when all you need is one well-aimed interjection?

Fluency in pop-cult speak requires downloading zillions of ephemeral yet curiously resonant info-bytes into your brain. It requires thinking in snappy icons, not antiquated prose.

Unlike the street-corner slang of decades past (``What's tickin', chicken?''), it demands plugging into the global network almost 24 hours a day, having at least a passing familiarity with the plot of ``Clueless,'' the cast of ``Frasier,'' the lyrics to the ``Titanic'' love theme and such surefire cocktail party icebreakers as ``Yo quiero Taco Bell'' and ``LOL.'' (That's Internet shorthand for ``lots of laughs,'' dude.)

No VCR? No home computer? No car? Sorry, Charlie, then you might as well be studying Sanskrit. And if you can't decipher this new ``language'' by yourself, you probably wouldn't get it anyway.

``I think maybe the first time I saw that approach working on TV was on `Late Night With David Letterman,' where if you didn't get it, the problem was with you,'' says Peter J. Marston, 38, a professor in CSUN's speech communications department. ``It was really the first show to boldly not care whether you got it or not, and that was really a pressure on you to watch the show so that you would be validated.''

For baby boomers, pop-cult speak is as natural as tearing up whenever the oldies station plays ``Yesterday.'' For their successors - the baby busters - it serves as a lonely roadmarker for a generation that lacks a definitive coming-of-age myth like the Great Depression, JFK's assassination or Woodstock.

``In the '70s, things probably started to fall apart a little bit, but I think that Watergate and disco and the sexual revolution pretty much hold things together. I don't know if you can say the same for heavy metal and Reagan and break dancing,'' says Glenn Gaslin, co-author with Rick Porter of ``The Complete Cross-Referenced Guide to the Baby Buster Generation's Collective Unconscious'' (Boulevard Books).

``We have probably too many reference points, too many genres of music, too many celebrities to keep track of,'' Gaslin says. ``I don't know if anything we actually say makes sense, because we've already forgotten it.''

For teachers struggling to pass along a cultural heritage, it's essential to master the new dialect.

``People don't know who a literary figure is, but everyone knows who Poppin' Fresh is. Everyone knows who Cap'n Crunch is,'' says CSUN's Peter Marston. ``I come into class with `Matlock' examples and I'm fine.''

So how'd we get this way?

American slang, of course, is as old as the Republic, says Geoffrey Nunberg, a commentator for National Public Radio and a consulting professor in the department of linguistics at Stanford University. Long before Walter Mondale asked Gary Hart, ``Where's the beef?'' American culture was rife with topical terms and references that now seem hopelessly obscure.

``It's sort of hard to imagine Woodrow Wilson citing a hamburger ad,'' Nunberg observes. ``But on the other hand, in Wilson's speeches there were a lot of contemporary references. If you read the speeches now, it's absolutely incomprehensible without a lot of footnotes.''

Apart from rare flashes of timeless oratory such as the Gettysburg Address, Nunberg says, the idea that our ancestors ``just wrote for the ages'' is not accurate.

(``Oh my God! They killed Abe Lincoln!'')

What's different between pop culture circa 1998 and circa 1863 is that sometime after World War II, Madison Avenue got hip to what was happening with American youth. Marketing men began repackaging the '60s counter-culture and selling it back as a youth-driven product with a short shelf life.

Among today's proliferating subcultures of teen-agers and young adults - hip-hop, slacker, ska-punk and so on - the demand for a lingo that expresses newness and tribal identity keeps accelerating.

Meanwhile, aging boomers are reluctant to surrender their own inalienable right to sound ``with it.''

``The teen-agers always had a special secret code. That's part of becoming an adult, to have a secret language,'' says Lieberman.

``But I think the difference is, 10 years or 20 years ago it wasn't as incorporated into the media. Now, to see grown-ups talking in or endorsing this language makes it seem like you don't have to grow up. You can talk like this forever. There's nothing really to strive for,'' she says.

Now that most Americans live in virtual communities strung along freeway exits, pop culture may be the only universal tongue possible. For a society that's deeply skeptical of politics, separated from its neighbors by locked gates and splintered into hundreds of ethnic and cultural enclaves, pop culture, like religion, allows us to confront subjects that might otherwise be too painful or divisive, and to share in a collective dream life.

So is there an upside to all this? Yes, says Dr. Mark Goulston, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and the host of a Yahoo Internet chatroom whose address is parenttime.com.

``A lot of the terms, shortcuts to communication, do serve a purpose in a too-busy-to-listen world, because with the information explosion, we often don't have time to consider, sort out, throw out and keep all the information that we're bombarded with every day,'' says Goulston.

``The downside, of course, is that you lose texture. You lose closeness, sometimes, in favor of cuteness. And sometimes because we're geared up to these brief bursts of communication, we're often more drawn to what delivers intensity instead of intimacy,'' he says.

Excu-u-u-se me? What could be more intimate and intense than curling up with your loved ones Sunday night to watch Homer and Marge?

If anyone has a better idea how to communicate in the '90s, show us the money.

`Buffy' story editors have finger on pulse of today's teen-speak

Pop culture references are so common in everyday speech that even people who create new references for the rest of us don't always notice the old references slipping in.

Dean Batali and Rob DesHotel, executive story editors for the WB network's cult hit ``Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'' say they don't consciously set out to use catch-phrases like ``bogarting the potato chips'' or drop offhand allusions to Ingmar Bergman's `The Seventh Seal'' into ``Buffy'' scripts. It just happens that way.

``We're not trying to go for those timely pop culture references so that people can nudge each other and go, `Hey, did you hear that?' '' says DesHotel, 31.

``You figure, well, at least enough people will know it and they'll really like it, and you just hope the rest of the people won't have to stop their VCRs and go look it up,'' adds Batali, 33.

In fact, what may explain the success of shows like ``Buffy'' and the WB's other new hit, ``Dawson's Creek,'' is that both have concocted versions of teen-speak that sound stylized and knowing, yet oddly fresh.

``A lot of magazines or periodicals think we've kind of hit on the way teen-agers talk, and I think it really isn't the way kids talk or adults talk,'' says DesHotel. ``I think you get into danger when you try to ape the way kids talk today because it changes so fast.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos, box

PHOTO (1) The cutting edge of pop culture is currently sharpening itself on such fare as ``South Park.''

(2) We have Fox's long-running ``The Simpsons'' to thank for such catch-phrases as Bart's ``Eat my shorts.''

(3) You may not be a single Jewish comedian living in Manhattan, but chances are you know the origin of ``Yada, yada, yada.''

(4) Garth (Dana Carvey, left) and Wayne (Mike Myers) of ``Wayne's World'' taught us the brief, to-the-point interjection ``Not!''

Box: `Buffy' on the pulse of today's teen speak (see text)