‘That Walk Was a Bear!’ Is ‘Bear’ Slang in That Sentence?

Mark Gocke / Jackson Hole News and Guide

It was snowing in Ann Arbor on Monday to welcome us back to campus. I had Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” playing in the classroom at 8:20 a.m. as students arrived, bundled up in scarves and heavy coats, and greeted each other after the long weekend.

“That walk was a bear!” one student exclaimed to her friend as she sat down.

“A what?” her friend asked, thinking she had misheard.

“A bear,” the student repeated.

Her friend looked at her thoughtfully. “I don’t know that slang word,” she observed. I, not even pretending not to be listening in on their conversation, jumped in and said, “I don’t think that is slang. I’m pretty sure that is old!”

Now, to be clear, usually at the beginning of class it is me saying that I don’t know a slang word as students share the slang word of the day. (Recently I have learned about “don’t at me” and “I’m not fronting,” “let’s get this bread!” and “cuffing season,” among other gems.) So I loved the student’s assumption that this unfamiliar use of bear was slang playing with the meaning of yet another word.

At the start of class, I asked how many students would understand “That walk was a bear,” and more than half indicated that they would — that for them it would mean the walk was difficult or unpleasant and that it wasn’t new for them. But, that stat of “more than half” means a good dozen students weren’t familiar with using bear to refer to a difficult task or situation.

This use of bear appears in a new draft addition (June 2003) to the Online Oxford English Dictionary (OED), with this definition: “orig. and chiefly U.S. Something notable or exceptional, esp. (in later use) something particularly arduous or fraught with difficulty. Frequently in (to be) a bear of a ——.” The first citation comes from 1910, and a quotation from 1958 captures the reference to something difficult: “But be careful. This track is a bear.”

OK, so this use of bear is not that old, and I’m left wondering if I’m right that it’s not slangy. Certainly it’s not brand new slang, but that’s a different question. And that I, in my middle age, know the word and not all the students, in their relative youth, do not know the word also does not mean that it isn’t slang! The editors of the OED decline to include a usage label for this use of bear (while they label as colloquial the use of bear to refer to someone who is exceptionally gifted or devoted to a pursuit — another draft addition in 2003 to the entry on bear). Merriam-Webster Online similarly provides no usage label with the definition of bear as “something difficult to do or deal with”; but with an almost identical definition, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5^th edition) labels this use of bear slang. Tom Dalzell includes the use of bear to refer to difficult or unpleasant situations in The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English (2^nd ed., 2018).

Of course, my question leads us to a bear of a task (sorry, I couldn’t help it): trying to define slang. This use of bear seems to me clearly informal and nontechnical (two typical characteristics of slang) as well as amusing, but does the word’s playfulness meet the bar of slangy irreverence? Does it have to? Or is being amusing and colloquial enough? Clearly dictionary editors do not all agree, and we don’t need to either. As a teacher and a linguist, the key to me is that students and I are noticing new words, and words new to us, with curiosity rather than judgment — and that calling a word slang (or not) is far from the end of the conversation.