American as She Is Spoke

DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG (669 pp.)--Compiled by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner -- Crowell ($7.50).

Webster is a moldy fig. For all its scholarship, the supposedly unabridged dictionary (600,000 entries) gives hardly a hint that the American language is in the grip of a permanent revolution. The Websterian ideal of language as a careful garden of hardy perennials and occasional exotics, cultivated by a corps of devoted lexicographers, is consistently challenged by a weedy invasion of the vulgate. Professors may still protest, but the public --and most authorities--tends to silence them. Says one philologist: "It was once thought that most slang came from the underworld, but nowadays a great deal of it comes from the average middle-class types who belong to golf clubs and bridge clubs and like to go skindiving."

Remarkably enough, there have been few really satisfactory dictionaries of American slang. H. L. Mencken made his prodigious contribution (The American Language), and Lester Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark produced their useful but not fundamental compendium (The American Thesaurus of Slang). Standing up well against the competition, Dr. Harold Wentworth, editor of the American Dialect Dictionary, and Stuart Berg Flexner, Cornell and University of Louisville philologist, have produced a handy, invaluable reference work that may well emerge as the standard in the field. In short, the authors have done a remarkably fly and dicty job.

Sitzfleisch & Fen. Inevitably, the book has faults. The authors might have been more critical of some sources and more revealing in etymology. For instance, no attempt is made to trace the origin of that wonder word "viggerish." There are other omissions; how did they ever miss such expressions as on the q.t., go pound sand (meaning "The hell with you, bub"), sitzfleisch (perseverance), penobscot (falsie), fen (well known to every boy who ever played marbles), screech (rotgut), or that masterpiece of imaginative profanity, the blivit (a term of personal description usually defined as "10 Ibs. of -- in a 5-lb. bag")?

But if some readers will regret that the book is selective rather than complete--according to Author Flexner, only 8,000 words are listed out of a possible 45,000 --they will probably agree that the selections in most cases are shrewd and useful. The authors have worked both sides of the street in every major slang-producing area--advertising, journalism, sports, show business, politics, Wall Street, the underworld, the armed forces, teenagers, jazz musicians, racial minorities and Texas. The contributions from Negro and Yiddish slang are particularly striking. Prudes may be disturbed by the volume of sexual references, but there is a fascination about the many different, often unlikely contexts in which sexual terms are employed in American slang.

Ong & Carnese. The book contains skaty-eight appendixes that are really zooly. Items: a list of more than 300 synonyms for being drunk, from alkied to zigzag; a children's bathroom vocabulary (boom-boom to wee-wee); a hilarious list of improper nouns (drygoodsteria, shinea-torium, baby-sittee); and a fascinating analysis of back slang (yob = boy), rhyming slang (plates of meat=feet), and the so-called "little languages" (Pig Latin, Pelf Latin, Gree, Na, Skimono jive, Ong, Carnese and Tutnee).

"Most American slang," Author Flexner states categorically, "is created and used by males . . . Women have very little of their own slang." If that generalization is true, U.S. males deserve vast credit. To judge from this volume, the slang-fed American language is a prodigiously vital and unremitting thing, a glorious mess of ramstuginous kafooster that may sometimes have to be put to bed with a shovel but is always and invariably ready for Freddie.

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