U. S. Slang

THE AMERICAN THESAURUS OF SLANG-Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark-Crowell ($5).

Lester V. Berrey has been at work on this absorbing, 1,174-page thesaurus since 1931. He got special checking help from such experts as Bing Crosby (on music), Variety's Jack Edward (entertainment slang), John A. Leslie of Ohio State Prison on the language of tramps and the underworld. His collaborator, Nebraskan Philologist Melvin Van den Bark, worked out the main outlines of classification and groupings of words. In general these follow Roget but they culminate in 430 highly readable pages on "Special Slang" of various trades, sports and regions. That section alone will probably help more third-rate novelists look like second-raters than .any previous book in history.

Everything, it seems at first, is in this book; such ghoulish, semi-slang tintypes as "God's image cut in ebony" (for Negro); such beautifully graphic trade terms as the miner's "snow" (for the sifting of earth presaging a cave-in), the ballplayer's "floater" (for a slow ball), the prostitute's "pivot" (for solicitation from a window). Practically all the unmailable words turn up, along with a tremendous set of their variants and embellishments. So does the surrealist language of drug addicts, the high-heeled dialect of perverts, the likable archaisms of lumberjacks (they still say "whitewater bucko"), and the shoptalk of the stock exchange and of the turf, which significantly share such terms as "sleeper," "tip sheet" and "past performance."

A complete job on U.S. slang is beyond human compass. "God-box" is given for Church but not for organ. "Profile" is curiously absent from journalistic slang. The Hollywood section fails to include "ootchimagootchi" (hot talk as an obbligato to Latin lovemaking), though it does give "wrinkle" (an actress' mother).

There are many other omissions; but on the whole, for every ten words any reader will miss, he will recognize a thousand and learn at least fifty. Thanks to the form of the book, even the mildest categories read like nothing since Rabelais:

"Interj. 10. CEASE!; STOP! Avast! belay that or there!, bottle it!, break it off!, can it!, cheese it!, cheezit!, chuck it!, come off (of it)!, come off the grass!, curl up!, cut it (out) !, douse it!, dowse it!, drop it!, enuff!, fade away!, freeze!, hold on!, hold up!, kill it!, lay off!, leave off!, let up!, nix!, nix on that!, ring off!, sign off!, siphon off!, sound off!, stow it!, turn it off!, whoa Bill!, whoa Maud!, whoa Mud!, whoa there!"

Or. in another dialect (the newspaperman's) : 30.

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