Word: berrey
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Remarkably enough, there have been few really satisfactory dictionaries of American slang. H. L. Mencken made his prodigious contribution (The American Language), and Lester Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark produced their useful but not fundamental compendium (The American Thesaurus of Slang). Standing up well against the competition, Dr. Harold Wentworth, editor of the American Dialect Dictionary, and Stuart Berg Flexner, Cornell and University of Louisville philologist, have produced a handy, invaluable reference work that may well emerge as the standard in the field. In short, the authors have done a remarkably fly and dicty...
...AMERICAN THESAURUS OF SLANG (1,231 pp.)-Lesfer V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark-Crowell...
...slang breeds faster than editors can edit or printers can print. The original edition of the mammoth American Thesaurus of Slang (TIME, March 2, 1942) had more than 100,000 words & phrases in it. By the time it hit the bookstores, it was already slightly arky. Now Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark have provided 5,000-6,000 more terms, partly teen-age talk, partly military slang, for a new, enlarged edition. A good many of the contributions sound like a disc jockey's idea of how a real, live jazz fan talks. Samples...
...just between tantalizing half-memory and ready reference. H. L. Mencken's A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources ($7.50) was as rich a book for ruminators as the year brought; and The American Thesaurus of Slang ($5), edited by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark, came about as near completely corralling the living, dead and deathless in native idiom as could be humanly expected of one volume. The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music ($3.95) was the most comprehensive book of its kind ever assembled...
Lester V. Berrey has been at work on this absorbing, 1,174-page thesaurus since 1931. He got special checking help from such experts as Bing Crosby (on music), Variety's Jack Edward (entertainment slang), John A. Leslie of Ohio State Prison on the language of tramps and the underworld. His collaborator, Nebraskan Philologist Melvin Van den Bark, worked out the main outlines of classification and groupings of words. In general these follow Roget but they culminate in 430 highly readable pages on "Special Slang" of various trades, sports and regions. That section alone will probably help more third...