Valley Girls

n pl

American

a Californian (and later more widespread) youth culture of the early 1980s, based on the habits, mannerisms and distinc-tive vocabulary of teenage girls from the San Fernando Valley region of outer Los Angeles. The Vals, daughters of affluent parents working typically in the media, music industry or professions, had devel-oped a sybaritic lifestyle in which con-sumerism ('recreational shopping') and leisure activities were elevated to a social code. Vals employed a colourful hyper-bolic repertoire of slang, typically expressed in a high-pitched, breathless drawl. Their lexicon was partly invented and partly adopted or adapted from the argot of surfers, college and high-school students and other sources. (Grody, gnarly and to the max are examples). Many of these terms became teenage vogue expressions on a wider scale in the mid-1980s.

► 'The greatest creative work that any Val does is trying to think of a good slogan for her [car number] plate.' (Harpers and Queen magazine, 1983)