Word: argot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...owner heard and hired her. He dressed his tiny discovery in a simple black dress and changed her name from Gassion to Piaf-argot for "little sparrow." The scrawny singer with the hoarse, throbbing voice that seemed far too powerful for so small a source was an instant success. Soon all France was listening to her tender, shamelessly sentimental songs...
When U.S. Negroes talk to one an other, their speech is often marbled with expressions incomprehensible to whites. Since slavery days, Negroes have created an ever-changing argot of their own, full of ambiguities, tinged with humor and sorrow...
Terms for the slings and arrows of life are abundant in the Negro argot...
Like other varieties of language, Negro argot is always in flux. Terms that are widely adopted by whites go out of style among Negroes, or take on radically different meanings. Square has lately come to mean cigarette, is losing the meaning-not hip-that is familiar to whites. "When it's hip among whites," says one white investigator of the Negro argot, "it's already square among Negroes...
...things are the intense jazz snobs whose twin occupations are fawning over musicians and playing it cool-the true believers who put Miles Davis up in the Kahlil Gibran class because he "has feeling," or else down in the Count Basie class because he makes money. In their tame argot, jazz musicians are "beautiful persons," and so, by osmosis, are they...