Do kids still read the Gettysburg Address in school? If they do, its majestic cadences must sound pretty odd to their pierced little ears, as antiquated as anything they might dig out of Cicero. (I mean the dead European male, not the suburb.) As they know him, the president of the United States is some oaf drawling, babbling, or dozing in front of the mike: will they believe that anyone from that low fraternity could utter poetry like “of the people, by the people, for the people”? The fall, sad to say, is only recent. Living memory can still cherish “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and even those in the first Pepsi generation may fondly recall the challenge to “Ask not…” It would be easy to argue that such words were misleading, even the exact opposite of the truth–but how picturesque they were, and how fitting! That elevated sense of occasion, a mere token of the pride our elected masters once took in their profession, has suffered a swift and withering decay. It was already a thing of the past by the time Nixon bequeathed “I am not a crook” to posterity, though what was coming next stayed dormant during the long rhetorical snooze of the Reagan years, an era that featured performance, not dialogue. But when the nation woke up in the 1990s and heard those two manly, democratic watchwords being delivered, crying out for marble and chisel, we knew the future had finally arrived: “Read my lips,” said one, to which the other replied, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
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This historical approach is the same one used by the Oxford English Dictionary, and there’s no doubt that anyone who already has El Supremo will want this new dictionary up on the same shelf, right where it can elbow the elder and somewhat gouty OED like a cheeky adolescent. To the others who normally flinch before such monuments to scholarship, I say go ahead and open this dictionary. What you’ll find inside, stripped naked yet utterly without shame, is simply your own culture–and that, fellow Americans, is anything but dull. In fact it’s all the more riveting when set down before you by the rubber gloves of science, which lets you inspect as you wish and judge only if you choose. Although the editor, Jonathan Lighter, is a professor at the University of Tennessee, he doesn’t stalk these pages with the birchman’s rod and neither does he sting your eyes with the dust of the pedant. His editing is transparent, with a result that is profound but also devilish good fun. There are few things more revealing about people than the words they invent for themselves once they’re safely outside the schoolroom and the tabernacle, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang seems certain to remain, for the next couple of decades anyway, the Bible of our own superb vox populi.
The HDAS is no field guide, obviously. This is only the first installment (A-G) of three volumes, and it’s more than a thousand pages, all with the unmistakable stamp of authority. That impression could be a little misleading since no dictionary, however definitive it may seem, can really hope to corral a darting colt like the vernacular of a great nation. The energy and experience of Mr. Lighter and his associates must have their limits. But they have gone a very long way, supplementing their prodigious research in the library with years of taking notes on TV, movies, and conversations overheard in the classroom and on the street corner. So there’s plenty of student slang, always a rich vein anyway, and possibly a slight regional bias. We find Arkansas credit card (a tube for siphoning gas), for example, but neither cheesehead, as applied to our rustic neighbors to the north, nor their rebuttal, fip (“Fucking Illinois Person,” in case you didn’t know). Everyone will notice favorites missing. I looked in vain for can belto, which neatly reverses opera’s “bel canto” to describe divas of the Whitney Houston/Linda Ronstadt persuasion. But gaps like these are microscopic in a dictionary that delivers such obscure wonders as gomer, a hospital term for the homeless that may have come from “Get Out of My Emergency Room,” ghost turd, a philosophical interpretation of the dust bunny phenomenon, and the fact that flaming asshole was first used during WWII to refer to the insignia on Japanese warplanes, the rising sun.
Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang is issued by Penguin Books; its editor is a widely published author with seven novels and nine books of poetry to his credit; he is also “the recipient of many awards,” as we are told: why then is there so little substance to the result?
Slang, as we’ve seen, is not always pretty; so if your idea is to give it “a better name, a better reputation,” clearly you’re going to have to do something. What Mr. Major does is take careful aim at the truth and then calmly shoot it right between the eyes. Among the casualties: bitch is “nonmalicious”; Goldberg (a Jew) is “sometimes derogatory, sometimes not”: riceman (a Chinese) is “mildly pejorative”; and cracker is described neutrally as “any poor, uneducated white person,” with no indication of its real force. Conk, which refers to straightening hair with a chemical treatment called congolene, makes Mr. Major uneasy for a different reason: he defines it simply as “pomade.” Colorstruck presents a similar problem. This time he explains it accurately (as the choice some blacks make to seek light-skinned dates or spouses), but goes on to call it “another American social abnormality,” leaving no doubt about who gets the blame.
There is a subtle prejudice at work in the notion of slang as a language of “the people.” It is the belief that because slang is not proper speech, it must also be the product of the uneducated and the low, the very ones found at the bottom of the heap; these lumpen are then supposed to fight back with their hardy and essentially uncouth idiom. This idea is not only condescending, it’s also wrong. Why else does “little slang of any kind” (according to Mr. Lighter) appear in the 41 volumes of testimony of former slaves collected by the WPA? Why have prostitutes (as opposed to pimps) not produced much slang either? And farmers almost none at all? To understand what’s going on here you don’t need to go as far as H. L. Mencken, who explained the last case by saying simply that “farmers, as a class, are extremely stupid.” You only need to realize that although slang is formed in groups, it has to be thought up by individuals one word at a time, and those guys have to have brains.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Dorothy Perry.
