Thomas’ observation isn’t very linguistically astute–come on, dude, it’s a handful of terms, not a melding of two phonetic, syntactic, morphological etc. “I don’t know–I’ve only been here a month, remember?” -p. Where’d all these weird words and phrases come from, anyway?” It seemed like they’d taken some other language and melded it with his own.Ĭhuck flopped back down with a heavy flump. (1) “You’ll learn a lot in the next couple of days, start getting used to things. (I’m labeling this excerpt and all others to be included in this post,as well as including page numbers which are from the version with ISBN 978-7-3). I suppose that Grievers, Creators, Greenie, Sloppers, Runners, Keepers, Builders, Bricknicks, Baggers, Track-hoes, Slicers, and Med-jacks all count as Glader slang, but they’re pretty self-explanatory (if largely unnecessary), so I’m just going to focus on defining by examples “shank”, “klunk”, “shuck”, and “good that.” Thomas hesitantly uses the latter phrase during an exchange with his assigned buddy, where he also explicitly references the fact that he’s unfamiliar with the terminology. So it’s kind of disappointing, because the Glade-specific language conventions could have been more complex and interesting, and designed by the author in a way to give more insight to the community, but we’ll just have to be content with what we’ve got. The real reason for the Glader slang, of course, is so that the characters can curse in a manner that won’t be objectionable for a young audience to read. Everyone has to start over finding a new social footing by navigating the new slang terms. For survival purposes, everyone is forced to share labor, food, and sleeping areas, nobody has access to ‘cool’ clothes or accessories, nobody can remember if they had famous parents or tournament trophies or straight As or a girlfriend before the Glade. The linguistic markers of social status might be even more important in a setting like the Glade, where there is very little to go on otherwise. Someone who maybe hasn’t really earned their place in the group or carved out an identity yet.
If you know the terms but stumble finding acceptable contexts to use them in, you’re pretty clearly linguistically marked to those in the know as someone trying to fit in. If you don’t know the terminology at all, you’re a total outsider. This is, of course one of the purposes of slang or jargon or “shibboleths” to identify members of a social group, or to confer insider status to those “cool enough” to know the terminology and be able to use it correctly.
As if he knew her.” Like you couldn’t be “concerned” for somebody who’s been in a coma for days? And then this part: “Thomas, concerned for Alby despite his recent ill-tempered ways…”, oh how big of you to be “concerned” when you find a person lying unconscious with a bloody gash on their head, “despite” the fact they’ve been moody or rude in the last 24 hours), the insistence to tell instead of show, things being brought up only to be dropped completely and forgotten later on (like the flag Thomas sees when he first enters the Glade but can’t make out it’s pattern because there’s no wind, and it’s never mentioned again, or the dog named Bark that follows him around for his tour of Slop duty but then is never mentioned again, not even when they’re holing up to fight against invading Grievers, which, wouldn’t a dog bark it’s head off and/or charge beasts attacking its masters?), the fact that when the situation is explained it still makes little to no sense, and the lack of female characters– especially when it’s revealed that the kids sent to the Glade were chosen because they “have above-average intelligence,” and I’m supposed to be okay with this representation of the smartest kids, humanity’s last hope, being all male?! What a bunch of klunk!)īut back to the topic at hand–when Thomas arrives in the Glade, his memories freshly wiped, he quickly learns that the residents of his new ‘home’ sprinkle their speech with their own unique slang, which he must learn in order to fit in.
(Things I didn’t like included the tediously slow (and ultimately unsatisfactory) reveal of answers, the near-complete lack of character development, the inconsistency of the main character’s attitudes towards other characters (like “go away Chuck you’re so annoying!”-“Chuck you’re my new and only friend!”-“gah Chuck stop talking you’re so annoying!”), the way Thomas pats himself on the back for feeling the most basic empathy for his fellow human beings (“…he realized he was worried about the girl. When I read James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, there was pretty much only one element that I actually liked the Glader slang. It will be interesting to see how the slang is handled on-screen. The Maze Runner is being adapted to film.