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By Ken Rickard
Advertiser Staff Writer

An old friend offered to buy me a beer when I ran into him at a bar. I sat with him and a couple of acquaintances at the corner booth by the window.

His buddy asked me where we knew each other from, and I said that we went to school together.

He turned back to me, tilted his head and with a definite hip-hop flair said, "For rizzle?"

For those of you unfamiliar what the dizzle with the rizzle is, it is a phenomenon that stems from rapper Snoop Dogg.

You need look no further than MTV and his show titled "Doggy Fizzle Televizzle" for a dose of the izzle-talk. (I no longer watch MTV, ever since I saw an episode of "Cribs" in which Li'l Romeo declared that a particular spot by the lake was where he goes "to be alone with his thoughts.")

The izzle invasion has been looming, but this is the first time I have ever encountered it in real life. I wasn't surprised by it, but I was somewhat taken aback that I understood what he meant.

I've asked around about the izzle, and there seem to be several methods for deciphering the code. The most popular is simply taking the first letter or sound of a word and ending it with izzle. For example "bizzle" could be anything from "basket" to "business."

Another take on Snoop-talk is to add the izzle on the last part of a word. Here "basket" would be "baskizzle" while "business" is "biznizzle."

I'm not the hippest guy out there. I've been out of the club scene for a while now, ever since I lost a girlfriend at the Ocean Club — I went in with her and left without her.

Also, listening to country music does nothing for my street cred.

The Snoop influence on pop culture is a curious one. When he first appeared as Dr. Dre's sidekick on the Chronic album he was billed as Snoop Doggy Dogg and he was just the tall skinny guy in the "Nuthin' But a G Thang" video.

Little did I know that he would become the barometer for all things trendy. I was still trying to see the humor in Beavis and Butthead.

Now he's everywhere, from "Girls Gone Wild" videos to Muppet TV specials (today's show is brought to you by the letter jizzle).

He's kind of like "The Matrix," which permeated all depths of pop culture until we were sick of it. Remember not too long ago when digital cows and Rugrats were mimicking Neo's gun battle?

Now the cliche Hollywood thing is to have elderly folks saying "fo' shizzle my nizzle" in movie trailers, to cheap laughs.

It was a harsh day for me when my 11-year-old brother started to rap along with Eminem on the radio and I hadn't even heard the song before.

As I enter my extreme-late 20s, I'm trying to hold on to the few things that bind me to adolescence, but Snoop-talk is not for me.

I'm gonna stick to the old-fashioned ways of saying things.

So I guess I'll talk, not tizzle.

I'll drive and not drizzle.

And if that means my finger is no longer on the pulse of cool, so be it. It was probably way off anyway. I'll just keep it simple.

For shizzle.

Reach Ken Rickard at krickard@honoluluadvertiser.com.