Agazed and Eujifferous

The Japanese and the Danes had to face it: they just weren't hep. They were confused and not often amused by the out-of-this-world conversation of American G.I.s and by the latest U.S. movies and books. How could they get with it? Last week, dictionaries offering what was. hopefully called the lowdown on the American language were near-sellouts in both Denmark and Japan.

Nearly 10,000 Danes had shelled out 4.50 kroner ($1) apiece for a 78-page, 3,000-word guide to U.S.A.-Slang. The lexicographers: Danish Newsmen Victor Skaarup and Kris Winther. To keep up to the minute and sometimes an hour or so ahead, Skaarup and Winther had listened to U.S. newscasts and radio comedians, swapped letters with Variety's Editor Abel Green and studied his slangy tradepaper of "show biz." (Said Green, washing his hands of some of their definitions: "They're talking smoergasbord slanguage.")

According to Skaarup and Winther, a bobby-soxer is a flapper; ladies' undies are called twilights; a drizzle is a boy who always walks with the same girl; and when you say attaboy, you mean either bravo, get at it again, or a member of an air transport auxiliary corps. After consulting the dictionary, Danes would have no trouble following the English dialogue of such Hollywood hits as Himlen kan vente (Heaven Can Wait), might tackle the best-selling Der gror et Trae i Brooklyn in the original.

In Japan, too, the American-language craze had caught everybody from streetcar conductors, who crammed between corners, to the hat-check boy at the swank Dai Ichi Hotel, who couldn't keep his hats straight for studying an English grammar. In Tokyo a standard Oxford Dictionary would get you $33 last week, and two made-in-Japan, slang dictionaries that out-defined the Danish version had topped 40,000 copies apiece.

Professor Saichi Sato, who wrote one, was a GHQ interpreter in the occupation's early days, and briefly published a Japanese imitation of TIME. Some definitions in Sato's go-page, pocket-size Dictionary of Current Americanism, New Words,

Slangs: acorn--to experience adversity; allot upon--to intend; agazed--astonished; acceptress--a girl who says yes right away. One word (chic) Sato couldn't define but could use in a sentence: "You'll be a chic before you are heck to flying."

Yoshinobu Takabe, in his Dictionary of American English, tried his own hand at word coining and joining. Samples: sexploration, eujifferous (impressive), chew a lone Nabisco (go stag).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.