Monday, Apr. 09, 1945
The Giggle Is a Caspar
"The giggle is a dirty Caspar. The cattle are aggieing about him."
If a visiting lecturer had chanced to overhear this remark at Mooseheart, Ill., site of a Loyal Order of Moose home & school for some 1,000 orphans, he would either be mystified or mortified. Translated from recorded Mooseheart slang, the remark means: "The visiting lecturer is a very queer person. The girls are gossiping about him."
The first study of slang in this small community, a self-contained unit ideally suited for the purpose, was made in 1930 by Leonard W. Merryweather of the Mooseheart School. Recently Psychologist Edmund Kasser made a second study. In the current Journal of Genetic Psychology he reports that:
P: Of 135 slang words used in 1930, only 18 survive in the current slang vocabulary of 78 words. (The decline, says Kasser, is the result of better teaching.)
P: Although the children are freely exposed to visitors, movies, newspapers, most of their new words are coined by themselves. Of the current 78, they made up 45.
P: Perhaps because of better relations between the children and their supervisors, old names for Mooseheart staff members--sluefoot, screw, night-caller, supreme being, walking tree--have died. An increase of tolerance has presumably caused the disappearance of such words as fish and fisheater (both meaning Catholic), and aquarium (a Catholic priest's home). Also gone are smutch (sneak-out), squirrel (psychologist, i.e., one who looks for "nuts").
P: Current words include snags (tonsils), tank (stomach), hilk (an interjection indicating embarrassment), storky (tall, scrawny) and bughouse (the Mooseheart Laboratory for Child Research).
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