Grody = Grotty?
Valley Girl came out while I was late HS or early college; I forget which.
Anyhow, “grody” caught on unironically, spread widely, at least in SoCal, and stuck; I still use it occasionally today pretty interchangeably with “gross”.
Ref @Elmer_J.Fudd it may well have been derived from “grotty”; it certainly carries the same connotation. E.g. poop is gross; 3-week old poop crawling with maggots is grody. There’s an essential element of deterioration in there I think.
The other two were always seen as jokes; over-the-top examples of something nobody would ever say seriously. Maybe the VG equivalent of a Betty Boop-ism. Likewise the over-the-top accent. It was a play on the adenoidal sound of the stereotypical SoCal Jewish American Princess, turned up to eleventy. But as spoken by the ultimate air-headed blond beach ditz.
Uh-uh. Clambake
Let’s blow this clambake
Interesting. Might be on to something.
Surfing slang.
(a) Of a cresting wave: hollow and curved, so that it is well-formed for riding on (U.S. Surfing); (b) more generally: wonderful, amazing, ‘fantastic’ (originally and chiefly U.S.).
If you enjoy the experience of being constantly stymied by ‘the vernacular of the Other’, I’d suggest you raise a teenager or two.
“Gonna dip.”
(figured out that that meant ‘leave’ by the context; kid was no longer there… which had been an undipped state, one might surmise).
“Yo, gotta dipset.”
A week later, the next permutation. Because “dip” was getting too mainstream?
But “blow” or “vamoose”… or “depart”? Nope. Too ‘normie’.
.
As an aside, our youth minister (40-ish female, demure) loves to say “Well, I’m going to make like a fetus and head out.”
Coincidentally, tonight I was reading a scan of this comic from 1946 and found this:
That’s nothing: I say “Let’s skedaddle!”
“Let’s blow this joint” is a seldom-used part of the family lexicon.
Another, more obscure phrase with the same meaning is “take the air”.
“Let’s blow this joint” was still current as recently as 2015. Around then, I was in Central America with a twenty-something American student who had recently learned Spanish, and it was time to go somewhere. I jokingly said “¡Soplemos esta articulación!” (literally “let’s blow (i.e., breathe on) this joint (e.g., elbow or ankle)”, and he got the joke right away.
Just remembered a use much like from the song: in the 1957 movie Silk Stockings, Fred Astaire says “Little brother will get everything he wishes if little brother will just blow” (meaning leave)
That use by gangster types was used as early as the 1930s in movies. Not sure if “real” gangsters used it and script writers picked it up or the writers invented it.
Better not tell a yegg to blow, unless you want to get exflunticated.