"A Giria Academica": Portuguese Student Slang

Abstract

Ever changing, student slang covers so much ground, both in space and time, that its study requires much persistence.* But it is an entertaining study, for, apart from the curious forms of the words themselves, this vocabulary reflects and brings to mind a world of traditions past and present, the notorious praxes academicas of Coimbra in particular, to which Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos, distinguished alumnus of the Coimbra Law School in the sixteenth century, seemed to allude when he referred to the paddle of the students' brotherhood in his play Eufrosina (Coimbra, 1555, Act v, sc. 8). The literature on the subject is small and recent. In Portugal, the slang of the Coimbra students was first explored by two young philologists at the suggestion of Manuel de Paiva Boldo. One of these was Amilcar Ferreira de Castro, who in 1947 published a thesis on Giria dos Estudantes de Coimbra. It was in the main a commented word list, compiled to a large extent on the spot, among students, drawing distinctions between current terms and those found in publications which had gone out of fashion. He also distinguished between terms used in schools generally and others--the vast majority-used at Coimbra University exclusively. Castro's still imperfect and incomplete study was improved upon by Delmira Ma~gs, first in A Giria dos Estudantes de Coimbra, a critical book review, in Boletim de Filologia ix (1948), 356-368, which added fresh material from Gil Moreno's older slang list of 1908-09. Her second article, A Formagio da Giria Estudiantil, Revista de Portugal, Serie A: Lingua Portuguesa, xv (1950), 101-116, dealt with the morphology and the semantics of Coimbra student slang more systematically than Castro had done. She showed, for example, how only sixteen terms had survived in a span of less than forty years since Gil Moreno had compiled his all inclusive slang vocabulary. Such rapidity of turnover constantly requires, as she pointed out, new studies on the subject. To be sure, a number of Portuguese have compiled glossaries of slang expressions, and Brazilians have done likewise, the latest in date being Antenor Nascentes, with his Giria Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1953). These glossaries comprise all kinds of slang and thus do not serve our purpose well. very useful, secondary source is the large literature of school reminiscences. Its finest examples are Trindade Coelho's In Illo Tempore, Estudantes, Lentes e Futricas (6th ed. Lisbon, Portugalia, n.d., 1st ed., 1902) and, for Brazil, Jos6 Luiz de Almeida Nogueira's Academia de Sio Paulo, Tradi~&es e Reminiscencias, Estudantes, EstudantJes, Estudantadas (9 vols. S. Paulo, 1907-12). To my knowledge, Brazilians have, however, not yet given close attention to the slang cultivated by students, either because it has seemed little developed to them, as one of my correspondents, a student in S. Paulo, surmised, or else because student slang has yet to be reached by Brazilian philology, which is of recent date.