Word: funk
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...editors and columnists. President Wilfred John Funk of Funk & Wagnalls, who writes light verse, publishes the Literary Digest and gets out a dictionary, last week tossed an exciting subject for controversy. He made up a list of the "ten modern Americans who have done most to keep American jargon alive...
From his list, Publisher Funk wisely omitted any definition of "jargon," gave no examples. If he meant the ten men who had coined the greatest number of slang words, his list would have been hard to defend. Astute commentators doubted whether any of the ten had ever coined any slang...
...stuck close to the jargon of baseball. Columnist Damon Runyon mixes authentic underworld talk with invented freaks. Gelett Burgess' The Goops contributed a less valuable word than Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. George Ade's Fables in Slang were funnier than real slang. Gene Buck, who, Mr. Funk said last week, had once told him he "was responsible for 100 words that are now current in the language" was guilty of a songwriter's exaggeration...
Real slang is invented by persons antisocial enough to resent commonplace terms but too ignorant to use synonyms. Publisher Funk's list necessarily omitted the coiners of such plain and useful words as "washout," "lousy," "okay," "beat it," "razz." Last week the fatherly New York Times which never permits slang to appear in its columns commented thus: "Good slang is 'sock on the jaw' and poor slang is 'economic Neanderthals' both from the collection of General Hugh Johnson. The first is as near to the soil as corned beef & cabbage; the second is recherch...
TIME refers to Detroit's radio priest, Father Coughlin as '''demagog." For this appellation the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary gives as definitions: "1. One who leads the populace by pandering to their prejudices and passions; an unprincipled politician. 2. Anciently, any popular leader or orator." Which definition was in the mind of modern up-to-the-minute TIME's usually accurate reportorial staff? I think an answer is due a subscriber and reader of long standing. I make no further comment here on this point lest I appear to be trying to put the answer...