American Language (115 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
First Vaudevillian — How they comin’, Big Boy?
Second V. — Not so hot, not so hot. I’m playin’ a hit-and-run emporium over in East New York.
First V. — Gettin’ much jack?
Second V. — Well, the storm and me is cuttin’ up two and a half yards, but when the feed bill and gas for the boiler is marked off, they ain’t much sugar left.
First V. — Why don’t you air her and do a single?
Second V. — I guess I should; every one that’s caught us says that the trick is a hundred per cent. me. I had ’em howling so forte last night the whole neighborhood was in a uproar. What are you doing these days?
First V. — I just closed with a turkey that went out to play forty weeks and folded up after ten days. Believe me, them WJZ and WEAF wise-crackers ain’t doin’ show business any good. In the West now they are even gettin’ the rodeo by radio.
Second V. — Why don’t you get yourself a partner and take a flyer?
First V. — Well, if I could get a mama that could do some hoofin’ and tickle a uke, I think I would.
Second V. — Well, ta ta, I gotta go now and make comical for the bozos.
If you get a chance come over and get a load of me, but remember, Capt. Kidd, lay off my wow gags.
76
Most of this, of course, would be intelligible to any college student: there is far more slang in it than argot or cant. The stage-hands and box-office men have lingoes of their own,
77
and there is a considerable difference between the vocabulary of a high-toned Broadway actor and that of a
hoofer
(dancer) who
grinds, bumps
and
strips (i.e.
, rotates her hips, follows with a sharp, sensuous upheaval of her backside, and then sheds all her clothes save a G-string)
78
in burlesque. Rather curiously, there seems to be no comprehensive glossary of theatrical argot in print.
79
That of the movies has found its Webster in Mr. Glendon Allvine, whose glossary of “Studio Lingo” is printed as an appendix to “The Silver Streak,” by Roger
Whately, Jack O’Donnell and H. W. Hanemann.
80
Some of the terms listed are very amusing. A
breakaway
is a weapon made of yucca-wood, so light that it will do no harm when a comedian is clouted with it. A studio hospital is a
butcher-shop
. The divan in a manager’s office is the
casting-couch
, A face without expression is a
dead pan
. The cancellation of a call for extras is a
death-knell
. The head property-man is the
first broom
, A performer’s business agent is a
flesh-peddler
, A Western picture is a
horse-opera
. An actor who seizes the center of the stage is a
lens-hog
. An elderly actress, commonly playing weeping mothers, is a
tear-bucket
. Camera lenses are
bottles
. A complaining actor is a
bleater
, A spoiled film is a
buzzard
. Noises in the sound-recording system are
canaries
. The fogging produced by halation is a
ghost
. An electrician’s helper is a
grunt
. An assistant cameraman is a
jockey
. Any performer not a Caucasian is a
zombie
.
Nearly every other trade has its argot, and some of them are quite as picturesque as that of the movie people. Vocabularies of many of them have been published.
81
Nor is there any lack of such jargons,
some of them unintelligible enough to the general to be almost classed as cant, on higher levels. The pedagogues, for example, employ many strange terms in their professional writings,
e.g., mind-set
and
stimulus-response-bonds
, and use others in strange ways,
e.g., project, to socialize
and
outstanding
. Two of their favorites,
reaction
and
outstanding
, have come into the common speech as counter-words.
I.Q.
, which they apparently invented, was taken in at once. But they have been less successful in introducing their confusing way of spelling out figures beginning with hundreds,
e.g., three hundred seventy-one
, with the usual
and
omitted. The social-workers, whose passion is the uplift, have developed a similar lingo, and some of its pearls,
e.g., community-chest, child-welfare, mental-hygiene
and
survey
, are now in general use.
82
Nor are the librarians, hospital nurses, fire insurance “engineers” and other such slaves to the common weal much behind.
83
In part, of course, these lingoes
consist of legitimate technicalities, but they also contain a great deal of loose speech that is more properly describable as either argot or slang. In the case of the nurses it even verges on cant, for one of its purposes is to conceal meanings from patients.
84
1
Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen
, Vol. CXVI, 1906. I am indebted for the reference to Concerning the Etymology of
Slang
, by Fr. Klaeber,
American Speech
, April, 1926. The process is not unfamiliar in English:
tawdry
, from
Saint Audrey
, offers an example.
2
It has since appeared in German, French and Swedish, as is shown by the titles of Deutsches Slang, by Arnold Genthe; Strassburg, 1892; Le Slang, by J. Manchon; Paris, 1923; and Stockholmska Slang, by W. P. Uhrström; Stockholm, 1911.
3
English Words and Their Background; New York, 1923, p. 43.
4
Art
. Slang, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14 ed.; New York, 1929.
5
American Slang (leading article), May 11, 1931. Many other definitions of
slang
are quoted in What is Slang? by H. F. Reves,
American Speech
, Jan., 1926. A few by literati may be added. “Slang,” said Carl Sandburg, “is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and gets to work.” “Slang,” said Victor Hugo, “is a dressing-room in which language, having an evil deed to prepare, puts on a disguise.” “Slang,” said Ambrose Bierce, “is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage-carts on their way to the dumps.” Emerson and Whitman were its partisans. “What can describe the folly and emptiness of scolding,” asked the former (Journals, 1840), “like the word
jawing?
” “Slang,” said Whitman, “is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which the froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away, though occasionally to settle and permanently crystalize.” (Slang in America, 1885.) And again: “These words ought to be collected — the bad words as well as the good. Many of these bad words are fine.” (An American Primer,
c
. 1856.)
6
The Psychology of Unconventional Language,
Pedagogical Seminary
, Dec., 1913, p. 443. “Our feeling and reactions to slang words,” continues Sechrist, “may be due to the word as such, to the use it is put to, to the individual using it, to the group using it, to the thing tabooed to which it applies, or to the context in which it is found.… Unconventional language keeps close to the objective world of things. It keeps oriented to the sense of touch, contact, pressure, preferring a language material which is ultimately verifiable by the most realistic sense.” This last, I fear, is somewhat dubious. See also An Investigation of the Function and Use of Slang, by A. H. Melville,
Pedagogical Seminary
, March, 1912; and La Psychologic de l’argot, by Raoul de La Grasserie,
Revue Philosophique
(Paris), Vol. LX, 1905.
7
It came in about 1765. During the early Eighteenth Century
elegant
was commonly used, and in Shakespeare’s day the favorite was
fine. Nice
has had many rivals,
e.g., ripping
and
topping
in England, and
grand
and
swell
in America, but it hangs on.
8
The King’s English and the Prince’s American,
Living Age
, March 15, 1928.
9
The Life and Growth of Language; New York, 1897, p. 113.
10
The American Language, in Academy Papers; New York, 1925, p. 149. Henry Bradley says (
Art
. Slang, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed.; 1929) that “slang develops most freely in groups with a strong realization of group activity and interest, and groups without this interest,
e.g.
, farmers, rarely invent slang terms.” The real reason why farmers seldom invent them, of course, is that farmers, as a class, are extremely stupid. They never invent anything else.
11
Mr. Funk added my own name to the list, but this, apparently, was only a fraternal courtesy, for I have never devised anything properly describable as slang, save maybe
booboisie
. This was a deliberate invention. One evening in February, 1922, Ernest Boyd and I were the guests of Harry C. Black at his home in Baltimore. We fell to talking of the paucity of words to describe the victims of the Depression then current, and decided to remedy it. So we put together a list of about fifty terms, and on Feb. 15 I published it in the Baltimore
Evening Sun
. It included
boo-bariat, booberati, boobarian, boo-bomaniac, boobuli
and
booboisie
. Only
booboisie
, which happened to be one of my contributions, caught on. A bit later I added
Homo boobus
, and Boyd, who is learned in the tongues, corrected it to
Homo boobiens
. This also had its day, but its use was confined to the
intelligentsia
, and it was hardly slang. Even
booboisie
lies rather outside the bounds.
12
Conway’s coinages are listed by Walter Winchell in Your Broadway and Mine, New York
Graphic
, Oct. 4, 1928, and in A Primer of Broadway Slang,
Vanity Fair
, Nov., 1927. In December, 1926, under the title of Why I Write Slang, Winchell contributed a very shrewd article to
Variety
. In it he differentiated clearly between the cant of criminals, which is unintelligible to the general, and what he called Broadway slang. The latter differs from the former, he said, “as much as Bostonese from hog Latin.”
13
Lexicographical explorers have found
whoopee
in a cowboy song published by John A. Lomax in 1910, in Kipling’s Loot (Barrack-Room Ballads), 1892, and in Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad, 1880.
Whoope
was common in the English literature of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, but it was probably only our
whoop
with a silent final
e
. Said Winchell in the New York
Mirror
, Jan. 17, 1935: “They contend
whoopee
is older than Shakespeare. Well, all right. I never claimed it, anyhow. But let ’em take
makirt whoopee
from me and look out!”
14
Dorgan’s claims to both
twenty-three
and its brother
skiddoo
have been disputed. An editorial in the Louisville
Times
, May 9, 1929, credits Frank Parker Stockbridge with the theory that
twenty-three
was launched by The Only Way, a dramatization of Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, presented by Henry Miller in New York in 1899. In the last act an old woman counted the victims of the guillotine, and Sydney Carton was the twenty-third. According to Stockbridge, her solemn “Twenty-three!” was borrowed by Broadway, and quickly became popular. He says that
skiddoo
, derived from
skedaddle
, was “added for the enlightenment of any who hadn’t seen the play.”
15
See Tad Dorgan is Dead, by W. L. Werner,
American Speech
, Aug., 1929.
The flea’s eyebrows, the bee’s knees, the snake’s hips
and
the canary’s tusks
will be recalled. A writer in
Liberty
, quoted in
American Speech
, Feb., 1927, p. 258, says that Dorgan also helped to popularize
hard-boiled
, the invention of Jack Doyle, keeper of a billiard academy in New York.
16
For a learned discourse on the pathological meaning of this term see
Punch Drunk
, by Harrison S. Martland,
Journal of the American Medical Association
, Oct. 13, 1928. In severe cases “there may develop a peculiar tilting of the head, a marked dragging of one or both legs, a staggering, propulsive gait with facial characteristics of the parkinsonian syndrome, or a backward swaying of the body, tremors, vertigo and deafness.” Some of the synonyms are
cuckoo, goofy, cutting paper-dolls
and
slug-nutty
.
17
See Jargon of Fistiana, by Robert E. Creighton,
American Speech
, Oct., 1933, and Color Stuff, by Harold E. Rockwell, the same, Oct., 1927. William Henry Nugent, in The Sports Section,
American Mercury
, March, 1929, says that the father of them all was Pierce Egan, who established
Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide
in 1824. A year earlier Egan printed a revised edition of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongues, 1785. In it appeared
to stall off, cheese it, to trim
(in the sense of to swindle),
to pony up, squealer, sucker, yellow-belly
, and many other locutions still in use.
18
See Baseball Slang, by V. Samuels,
American Speech,
feb., 1927, p. 255. Hugh Fullerton, one of the rev. elders of the fraternity, says that the first baseball reports to be adorned with neologisms,
e.g., south-paw, initial-sack, grass-cutter, shut-out
and
circus-play
, were written by Charlie Seymour of the Chicago
Inter-Ocean
and Lennie Washburn of the Chicago
Herald
during the 80’s. Some years ago the Chicago
Record-Herald
, apparently alarmed by the extravagant fancy of its baseball reporters, asked its readers if they would prefer a return to plain English. Such of them as were literate enough to send in their votes were almost unanimously against a change. As one of them said, “One is nearer the park when Schulte
slams the pill
than when he merely
hits the ball.
” For the argot of baseball players, as opposed to the slang of sports writers, see Baseball Terminology, by Henry J. Heck,
American Speech
, April, 1930.
19
See Golf Gab, by Anne Angel,
American Speech
, Sept., 1926. In 1934 Willis Stork, a student of Dr. Louise Pound at the University of Nebraska, prepared a paper on The Jargon of the Sports Writers, mainly confined to an examination of the sports pages of two Lincoln, Neb., papers, the
State Journal
and the
Star
from July 1, 1933 to July 15, 1934. So far it has not been published. See also Our Golf Lingo Peeves the British,
Literary Digest
, April 11, 1931.
20
Modern English; New York, 1910, p. 211.
21
Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin; London, 1922, p. 300. G. K. Chesterton said pretty much the same thing in The Defendant; London, 1901: “All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”
22
This sense of the word, of course, is to be differentiated sharply from the philological sense of a more or less secret jargon.
23
A long list of his contributions to the vocabulary, including a number borrowed from the slang of his time, is to be found in Modern English in the Making, by George H. McKnight; New York, 1928, p. 188
ff
.
24
In 1932–33 Dr. Walter Barnes of the New York University set four of his associates to canvassing 100 college, high-school and elementary teachers on the subject of slang. They were asked to scrutinize a list of 432 slang terms, and to estimate them as acceptable, trite and forceless, doubtful, or offensive. Those chosen as most acceptable were
pep, fake, stiff upper lip, double-cross
and
booster
. All these, in ordinary discourse, are nearly if not auite irreplaceable. Others high on the list were
speakeasy, bone-dry, broke, fan, go-getter, snappy, to make the grade, pull
(in the sense of influence),
come-back, frame-up, racket, give-away, cinch
and
to turn down
. The results of the inquiry were issued in mimeograph as Studies in Current Colloquial Usage; New York, 1933.
25
The life of such a word or phrase seems to depend, at least to some extent, upon its logical content. When it is sheer silliness the populace quickly tires of it. Thus “Ah there, my size, I’ll steal you,” “Where did you get that hat?”, “How’d you like to be the iceman?”, “Would you for fifty cents?”, “Let her go, Gallegher”, “So’s your old man” and their congeners were all short-lived. Many such vacuities have a faintly obscene significance. It is their function to conceal the speaker’s lack of a logical retort by raising a snicker. Those of rather more sense and appositeness,
e.g.
, “Tell your troubles to a policeman,” “How did you get that way?”, “Where do you get that stuff?”, “I’ll say so” and “You said a mouthful,” seem to last longer. In 1932 a Bridgeport, Conn., high-school teacher, Miss Julia Farnam, told the Bridgeport
Post
on returning from a visit to England that she had met there “the daughter of an earl” who thought “You said a mouthful” “the cleverest expression she ever heard.” (
Post
, Oct. 3.)
26
These and the following examples are taken from The Age of Slang, by J. Louis Kuethe,
Baltimore Evening Sun
, July 3, 1934.
27
For this I am indebted to Mr. James D. Hart of Cambridge, Mass.
28
Is American English Archaic?
Southwest Review
, Summer, 1927, p. 302.
29
The first example in the Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary is from John Neal’s Brother Jonathan, 1825.
30
Specimens of this tall talk are given in Chapter IV, Section 1.
31
For these examples I am indebted to M. M. Mathews, who prints a longer list in The Beginnings of American English; Chicago, 1931, pp. 114–15.
32
For a much longer list see Slang Synonyms for
Drunk
, by Manuel Prenner,
American Speech
, Dec., 1928.
33
The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 114.
34
There is a list of them in English Words and Their Background, by George H. McKnight; New York, 1923, p. 61.
35
I am indebted here to Mr. Hiram D. Blauvelt. The literature dealing with American college slang begins with A Collection of College Words and Customs, by B. H. Hall; Cambridge, Mass., 1851. Its contents are summarized in College Slang of a Century Ago, by Joseph C. Smith,
Delta Kappa Epsilon Quarterly
, May, 1933. For the slang in vogue at the beginning of the present century see College Words and Phrases, by Eugene H. Babbitt,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Pt. I, 1900, a very valuable compilation. For later periods see College Slang, by M. C. McPhee,
American Speech
, Dec., 1927, and College Abbreviations, by W. E. Schultz, the same, Feb., 1930. There are many monographs on the slang of definite colleges, for example: College Slang Words and Phrases From Bryn Mawr College, by Howard J. Savage,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. V, 1922; Colgate University Slang, by J. A. Russell,
American Speech
, Feb., 1930; A Babylonish Cruise [Girard College], by Carroll H. Frey,
Steel and Garnet
, Dec., 1922; Johns Hopkins Jargon, by J. Louis Kuethe,
American Speech
, June, 1932; Kansas University Slang, by Carl Pingry and Vance Randolph, the same, Feb., 1928; Midshipman Jargon, by Mary B. Peterson, the same, Aug., 1928; Negro Slang in Lincoln University, by Hugh Sebastian, the same, Dec., 1934; University of Missouri Slang, by Virginia Carter, the same, Feb., 1931; Slang at Smith, by M. L. Farrand,
Delineator
, Oct., 1920; Stanford Expressions, by W. R. Morse,
American Speech
, March, 1927; Stanfordiana, by John A. Shidler and R. M. Clarke, Jr., the same, Feb., 1932; More Stanford Expressions, by John A. Shidler, the same, Aug., 1932; and College Slang Words and Phrases From Western Reserve University,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. III, 1915.