Introduction and some preliminary observations.

Greetings to anyone who is reading this blog. It's a part of my assessment for a module on lexicography and lexicology, and will catalog some of my observations on the dialect/jargon spoken by my close friends at the National University of Singapore, where I am doing a course in English Language.
I have been late in setting up the blog, and there must be two observations per week, hence, I shall write one blog post summarising both my observations.
Wanted to start of the blog with something that has been an obsession of sorts for me for quite a long time: the jargon/dialect spoken by my Indian Tamil friends at NUS.
They are mostly engineering students from Chennai and other Tamil Nadu towns. Their language is rich with tamil words and more importantly, tamil slang words. Tamil slang is itself replete with several english words that suffer meaning shifts to mean things hardly intended originally. The Indian tamils at NUS have not been behind in adding new words to this cauldron of Tamil, English and even the odd Hindi word. Here are some, and some instances of their usage. This slang, often known as Madras Tamil, or Thanglish (Tamil + English) is largely spoken by Chennai youths. These are the two things I have observed, one is universal to all Madras Tamil speakers, another is specific to NUS students.
1) Figure: an attractive girl. This is from the heartland, almost every tamilian in NUS, even the Singaporean Tamils will tell you what this means. In fact, its about time to give you this valuable link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madras_Tamil
figure is used quite frequently in Tamil films to refer to the woman the hero has fallen in love with. The word figure, referring to an attractive girl probably evolved from the fact that attractive women usually have good figures..
2) Helmet: This is one word that is entirely restricted to NUS Tamil Indians. A 'helmet' in NUS Indian Tamil parlance, is someone who might as well be wearing a helmet for all the attention he gets from 'figures', and all the attention he gives them. Helmet has barely spread beyond the confines of the Tamil gang in NUS. Here is an instance of its use in facebook. http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=rushi+padhuman&init=quick#/photo.php?pid=709993&id=227701264
This was a snarky response to the twee smiley collections that fb users were tagging with names of friends, like so.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1356711&op=1&o=global&view=global&subj=718125373&id=512269319
Since most of the smiley tagging was being done by girls, it was only natural to respond with the helmet assortment.
The concept of priming, is significant here. Both words have acquired meanings in slang that are not available in standard English. As such for speakers of madras tamil, they recall things other than what they refer to. If one were to conduct a priming experiment with one group of confirmed Madras Tamil speakers and non madras tamil speakers, and have the word helmet precede the word figure, the madras tamil speakers would pick up the word with far greater frequency.
I am yet to tease out the far reaching implications of this idea, but one thing that does come to mind: if jargon words are special cases of priming, that is, where often very small groups are primed for certain word pairs, wouldn't it be useful as a test for collocation in general? We cannot easily trace the origin of collocations, but perhaps we can see how collocations slowly begin to form over a period of time by examining a group of jargon users?
Going further, can we say that just as pidgins are useful for the study of language's whose grammar is in the making, perhaps jargon is lexicon in the making?
Would appreciate your comments on this.