From The Atlantic
By Jason Richards
Over the course of his career, rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs has shifted aliases a few times: He's been Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy and, lately, just Diddy. On Friday, though, he unveiled a new name change. Don't call him Sean anymore—call him "Swag."...
Truth is, "swag" is having a moment....
"It's gonna be lasting, man," he says. "It's hitting hard right now. It's crucial. Other than curse words, it's gotta be in the top ten most used slang words."
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley's School of Information, disagrees. He says chances are slim that "swag" will endure the way "cool" has. "Cool," he explains, is an anomaly, the very rare slang word that has survived a pattern of cultural transferal, making its way from the 1920s jazz era to the '50s beat generation through writers like Norman Mailer and Chandler Brossard, to 60s-era hippies, from surfer subculture to nerdspeak to rap, and on and on.
"But that's very weird if a word does that," Nunberg says. "Almost all of these words come in and then disappear. Because that's the point—high school freshmen and young management consultants spin off new words so that their language sounds different from [that of] the old boys. Obviously, some of them do persist, but it's very hard to predict which ones will....