Word: argot
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...master of invective, Mencken never failed to beguile his audience. Even Southerners were amused when he labeled Dixie the Sahara of the Bozart. And his classic encyclopedia, The American Language, brilliantly traced the wellsprings of slang and ethnic argot. But in larger matters he was more naive than the booboisie. When real goose-steppers came along, Mencken failed to perceive the German danger and, as Fecher notes, "brushed off Nazi treatment of the Jews." His literary criticism was sometimes blind to contemporary talent: he thought Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was "full of pink hooey" and found...
...high obtrusive fuchsia - and the writhing knots of line, the words blinking like neon signs, the beat and pulsation of the space: this was visual jazz, American-style, and in deed some of Davis' titles, like The Mellow Pad, 1945-51, were couched in the musicians' argot...
...narrative starts off on a conventional note. The camera follows a prison guard into the inner confines of the penitentiary, enabling Young to run through a quick introduction of the various inmates around whom the plot centers. Miguel Pinero fills his script with the street-wise argot of Harlem and the South Bronx that gives the dialogue an authentic ring. The effective color and accuracy of the ghetto-flavored jive should hardly come as a surprise; Pinero owes this ability to evoke a particular brand of slang to his own experience as an inmate at Sing Sing Prison. The crisp...
...piece on Cornwell was the work of Senior Editor Stefan Kanfer, who wrote the story; London Correspondent Dean Fischer, who interviewed the novelist; and Reporter-Researcher Anne Hopkins, who did what would be described in Le Carré's spy argot as the "burrowing"-the background research. Fischer talked with Cornwell for 16 hours, both in London and at the author's farmhouse overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Cornwell lived up to his reputation as a rugged interview only when he jauntily insisted that Fischer join him on a "forced march" of three miles over the cliffs near...
...smooth, controlled comic of the cerebrum. He was, if anyone, Lenny Bruce, the angry, violent screamer from the acid gut. Pryor changed his act, bringing it back in spirit to Peoria's black ghetto and the mean streets all over the U.S. He started to talk in the argot of the pool shark and the hustler, a language so obscene that it is no longer obscene, with four-letter words so common that they now seem part of the verbal furniture. Is he vulgar? Of course, but not in his own eyes. "Vulgar," he says, "is like Richard Nixon...