Word: argot
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...more than half a century, their humor has come largely out of their exotic argot. It is their link now with a more exciting, more amusing past. We went back next morning to the house of the old man who spoke the language. His name is Phocian McGimsey, but everybody calls him Levi. He is 73. His grandfather came West to Boonville in 1852. He told us that the language is "Boontling," which is a corruption of Boonville Lingo. In English sprinkled with Boontling, Levi described what Boonville was like in those days: a rough frontier town first settled...
...Argot Born. One day in '92, sitting around the Anytime Saloon, Reg and Tom Burger and the Duff brothers started putting some of their old Scotch-Irish dialect words together with some on-the-spot code words into a language that the enemies-be they womenfolk, their rivals, their elders, their children-could not possibly understand. It caught on, rapidly losing its value as a code; soon "Boontlingers" and their friends were eagerly trying to shark (con) each other with new inventions...
Behind the scenes, the Soviets were doing some hoisting of their own, as they elevated their men to power. They are prudently not promoting for the new posts outright Stalinists from the Novotný regime; instead, they prefer respectable, obedient bureaucrats. In Prague's current political argot, these men are called "the realists." The new federal Premier, for example, is Oldřich Černík, who was also Premier during the Dubček period but has since shown his willingness to cooperate with the Soviet occupiers...
Burgess's ingenious plot is couched in some of the most high-powered and imaginative language (including Russian, Arabic, Gothic, Latin, Spanish, and dialects) since Joyce. (A Clockwork Orange, Burgess's best-known work, is written in a hybrid argot of his own invention.) But Joyce had many voices and no one style; Burgess, for all the richness of his repertoire, writes in a monotone that is no more varied than his fixed point of view. Cleverness ("She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions."), hyperbole ("his insides...
...father gave him the nickname as a boy. It is argot for military barracks mates who are buddies...