Meghan Elliott knows her slang vocabulary is “rad.”

Even if the word is considered “whack” by many slang standards.

“Oh, I use ‘rad’ all the time,” the women’s studies and psychology junior said. “Sometimes they do a double take, but usually I get a pretty good reception.”

Elliott also admitted to saying “right on” and “dang” on a regular basis.

Sure, the language of slang among students can be a mystery to most parents and professors. But the reasons behind words such as “crib,” “dookie” and “gnarly” can be explained.

Judi Sanders, director of the College Slang Research Project at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, Calif., started the project with this in mind.

“I came to Cal Poly originally as a speech teacher, and one of my students was giving a speech. She was talking about one of her friends ‘bagging on her’ and I realized at that moment I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, that I was out of it,” she said. “Sometimes those really turn into great teaching moments.”

Sanders said slang use is the one element all college students share, and makes for an interesting study.

“This could be a possibility for looking at different cultures in an environment students could relate to,” she said. “This would be something every student would have exposure to and could be used to see how language functions.

“Plus of course, it’s fun.”

The project, which began in 1990, has led to numerous discoveries regarding slang use among college students.

One of those found the word “cool” remains popular year after year, while words such as “rad” lose usage quicker.

College students also tend to try to claim some slang as their own, as untrue as that might be, Sanders said.

“Slang doesn’t change all that much, but the speakers think it does,” she said. “Because slang is mostly an oral thing, each new generation tends to think they have invented slang. But it is remarkably similar and consistent.”

Other slang words, such as “dope” remain in use, but have drastically changed meaning in the three or more decades they have been used.

“It means cool or something very good, although if you looked at the generation when most college professors were in college, it meant drugs back then,” she said.

Sanders said some slang words may originate on the West Coast and migrate eastward.

“It’s a little hard to know how they move,” she said. “A certain amount does pass by word-of-mouth, but a lot of it comes from what’s in popular culture.”

And Sanders said a large number of slang words in recent years have been influenced by hip-hop music and films such as “Clueless,” and more recently, “Orange County.”

“I’ve not yet seen ‘Orange County,’ so I don’t know how much slang is in it, but that’s an example of a movie that will send a bunch of slang all over,” she said. “‘Clueless’ incorporated a whole bunch of what were common slang terms in use in Southern California into the nation’s vocabulary.”

With the surging interest in the College Slang Research Project, Sanders launched an online dictionary of terms collected by students at the university.

Universities across the country also have submitted to the project slang terms heard on their campuses.

But the project isn’t the only one of its kind.

Pamela Munro, a linguistics professor at UCLA, teaches a class every four years analyzing slang use among college students. A dictionary defining examples of slang used among students at UCLA was first published in 1989.

“It’s a really fun project,” Munro said. “They have a good time. Everyone has fun with all these crazy words and learns a lot about grammar.”

The latest edition documenting slang used at the university, “u.c.l.a. slang 4,” contains words and phrases compiled during 2001 and continues to sell among students, she said. During the more than 12 years Munro has studied slang, she said several discoveries similar to Sanders’ have been made, including the idea of slang moving to the east.

“I think that’s a good observation and I definitely believe that,” she said. “I think a lot of slang originates on the West Coast with all the media in Los Angeles, moves eastward and seems to affect college slang.”

And Munro said slang used by her students during the years at UCLA has rubbed off on her, increasing her knowledge of the sometimes unexplainable language of college students.

“Slang is really fun,” she said. “There are a lot of very, very exciting and neat metaphors that a lot of people aren’t aware of because they don’t listen to the way young people are talking.”

For more information about the College Slang Research Project, visit www.csupomona.edu/~jasanders/slang/project.html.