Word: argot
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Concludes Fadiman: "With authoritative teachers by the thousands daily and nightly teaching Televenglish to 170 million students, it is likely that in 50 years the Televenglish professor will be examining an obsolescent minority idiom known as English, just as today the academic linguist studies the argot of thieves or the slang of the hashhouse counterman...
...They keep talking about the iron curtain," complained a Rome cab driver last week, "but it's not the iron curtain that worries me. It's the green curtain that comes down every morning between me and my cabbage." In the argot of workaday Rome, the green curtain is the term used to describe the veil of mystery behind which the shrewd middlemen in the city's huge wholesale vegetable market operate to send the prices of simple foodstuffs soaring...
...piece of Hollywood argot not to be found in The Deer Park is "subpoena envy," which may be defined as the state of mind of the Hollywood liberal who never got called before a committee investigating anything. Author Mailer seems to have a bad case of it. His account of the interrogation by a pair of foul-mouthed goons in the hire of the "Subversive Committee" is calculated to frighten little children. It is bad enough for Mailer to paw every bed on the coast without finding Senator McCarthy underneath...
Thus, with the poetic license of storytellers through the ages, TV Comedian Steve Allen updated the Grimm fairy tale in jazzdom's Down Beat magazine last spring. It was intended only as a private joke for bopsters, told in the latest Tin Pan Alley argot, where "cool" means good, "crazy" means wonderful and anything that is really tops is simply called "the most." But the tale quickly reached a larger public when Manhattan Disk Jockey Al "Jazzbo" Collins read it over the air, then recorded it for Brunswick. The record has sold a reported 200,000 copies to become...
...underworld that lies behind the lovely façade of Paris, a new population has moved in on the oldtime apache. In the argot they are les Bicots, but respectable Parisians call them les Algériens. After 1946, when the people of Algeria were granted full French citizenship, they began pouring into France at the rate of 30,000 a year. Arriving in Paris on the slow trains from the Midi, they drift with their bundles into the old, revolutionary districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant, where whole blocks now have the sound and smell of Algerian medinas...