I recently re-watched Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' (based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess), the first viewing being around 8 years ago. Apparently, I wasn't curious enough to research it the first time round, but the curious slang used by Alex and his 'droogs' is actually called 'Nadsat', a slang dialect of English (with Russian influence) invented by Anthony Burgess himself. Nadsat is basically English, with some transliterated words from Russian. Not surprisingly, the word Nadsat is itself in Nadsat, it is a transliteration of the Russian suffix for 'teen' indicating that such a language would probably be invented by small groups of teenagers who then talk 'Nadsat' amongst themselves. What is interesting to me personally is that as a teenager, my 'droogs' and I had unknowingly created our own fairly decent Nadsat (my droogs happened to be very creative, undocumented language though) which is basically English, but would probably make little sense to an outsider (we happened to call it 'Gate Lingo' .. ok doesn't sound as cool as Nadsat). And as I spell check this post, I realize that the ignorant spell checker is blissfully unaware of Nadsat :-)
Some of my fave Nadsat words
devotchka meaning young woman, russian: devochka
horrorshow meaning good, russian: khorosho
gulliver meaning head, russian: golova
What is Nadsat ?
Full Nadsat Lexicon
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