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From: Bo S
Category: Category 1
Date: 25 Jun 2002
Time: 10:22:15
Remote Name: 216.0.47.235
Dear Jimbo and others,
Word meanings and usage are always changing. Not all words of course, but the changes come without notice. Longhair used to be someone who liked classical music. Bad used to be awful. Some cool is now hot.
I think it was William Burroughs who pointed out that hip talk, or druggie slang, would by its very nature be elusive and varying enough to be misleading without being incriminating. I would love to see the day that 'recovery' meant 'clean addict.' Our language has been showing up in the movies for quite some time. Face it, addicts push the envelope on life. Many new words come from addicts. They make them up as they go along. I have and so have you. Remember when hippie had to do with a woman's love handles? And broad meant wide?
Addictionary, which came in from recovering addicts in New Jersey, is a real achievement in my eyes because so much of our disease is obscured in rhetoric and half truths. Much of recovery is just getting realer about things, who we are and what we really feel. There is an interesting item in the dictionary on the word addict. When the Basic Text was being written, I led a search of a word that was equivilent to alcoholic in as much as an alcoholic is a candidate for recovery and a drunk is not. That is their slang, of course. We found ourselves back at the word with the 'ic' ending but it didn't have the recovery conotation. We realized we would have to supply the recovery conotation in the way we lived. The word with the 'ic' ending is addict.
Also, from the dictionary, there is an entry on the origins of the word from ad decere, which is similar to 'from saying.' A judge two hundred years ago could addict you to jail. How about that?
In Loving and Happy Service,
Bo S.