"COOLABOOLA." It's not a Bornean call of the wild. Nor a fancy greeting that will get you a first class meal in a tropical rainforest. No, it just means "cool". And it's bound to be spreading its syllables around some watering hole or corner shop near you - particularly if you're living in Dublin.
One thing city people generally do is seek "the easy way out".
"Give me convenience or give me death," in the cynical words of punk group, the Dead Kennedys: but that's not what's happening here. On the silver tongue of the Dubliner, words can become mere playthings.
Why else replace "cool" with "coolaboola"? Why stick your tongue out and make such a meal of a word, when it could take as little time as the most muffled utterance that ever fell from the lips of our Neanderthal forebears?
Ruaille buaille - Irish for commotion or ruction - is the inspiration for this mutant. And of course it wasn't a conscious effort, to dream that up. No - it was lingual play acting.
Some Dubliner coined "coolaboola", and "his club" has its recruiting agencies in Dublin. Its membership, however, doesn't extend to all parts of the Pale.
The role of any club, you could say, is to give some sense of belonging to those born to it. And, as everyone with cute money knows, inner city Dublin society is not a circle you can pretend to belong to.
So what's the suss? If you were Malahide to the Barry Lang, see, you'd have no problems being wide to such slang. If you gave a lot of Bugs Bunny for those 1's and 2's, your shoes certainly weren't cheap. The fact is (never mind facts), you can make this stuff up. And that is the whole point.
All of us indulge in jargon of some sort - it's just that this becomes more acceptable, and therefore more invisible as it spreads beyond the original club. Even such a classically English word as "being" probably had its origins in the hogwash of some drunken, Anglo Saxon peasant, who lived in a hole in the ground.
The Dublin animal has a great handle on the slippery mish mash that is language. It's something to cavort with warm marla between the fingers, in which (if you're from parts of the Northside, at any rate) - "serious" can equally mean a thing is great or awful; "deadly" means something's full of life, and "safe" can tell you you're probably in for something wild.
Even in Cork, they play the game. Sonia O'Sullivan, as she sat there during the post 5,000 metres Olympic final press conference, surrounded her statements with "You know ... you know". This is a verbal device which many of us use when we try to say to each other that we are really alike; that the things that make us different can be overcome. Sonia felt bad at the time - and not just for her own sake so she hoped to get us to understand a little better, you know, how her predicament came about.
We all construct slang in a "matey" kind of fashion, whatever gang we belong to. Like in jokes, a tiny little hardcore of terms, known merely to the few, can be used as a wall against the world. They shore up our fantasies of elitism and help us laugh at those we live with, and yet also despise.
The code is understood by those in the know, from its context. And of course, by the rhyme, when there is one. But the question still remains - why do people use such slang? Why is it that anyone should call the pill "Jack and Jill"?
Of course, Big Bro is out there taking stock of all this. Along with the security cameras on the streets of the city, eavesdropping on the part of security organisations puts them wide to the carry on indicated by the secret language of the people on the street.
Take for instance a certain security manual (as secret as the underworld slang itself) which contains a list of terminology exclusive to the spied upon species. Here, "heavy" is described as violent or aggressive, "into somebody" means to really like them while to "split" means to leave, to go away hurriedly.
So all you criminals out there better beware - the boys have their finger on your pulse.
And whoever it was that wrote in the course of his or her Leaving Cert 1995 English exam about lady Macbeth having invited Duncan to a "sleepover" at her place, certainly was able to put a modern twist on the event. The Department of Education later reviled the heresy. The mistake was to put it in writing because slang, after all, is a spoken sport.
The use of slang endears us to our friends, and often puts us on the inside track. It also gets us somewhere with the opposite sex. (Perhaps this is its primary method of reproduction could it be passed on in our jelly beans?) Just watch while some twinkly tongued Lothario you know chats up a lady, and throws silly little quips into his repartee.
And where does it come from? Some would say it arrived off the telly. You could look for Cockney rhyming cross fertilisation from the likes of Steptoe And Son, and Only Fools And Horses.
And what would he the academic explanations? Not much more than elaborations on the fact that language and people, and slang, never stand still. They live and breathe and move about, affecting and infecting one another without realising it, in a hundred different ways. And fair olden goose to them.