Word: hep
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Texas Across the River, on the contrary, shoots its cliches straight from the hep. The main characters are prairie prototypes, comically mugged. The hero (Dean Martin) is the bunkhouse bum: tall in the saddle, low in the brow, pronounces cow in three syllables, thinks "ideals" is what a man says when he picks up a deck of cards. The heroine (Rosemary Forsyth) is Pioneer Womanhood: wears what looks like gingham by Givenchy, stands behind eyelashes a prairie owl could roost on, pronounces cow in four syllables, passes for a lady in a country where census takers count feet and divide...
...circumstances of cultural isolation-speak a nonstandard English (linguists call it "dialectolalia") with common characteristics. They may slur words as in "sawrat" (it's all right), "sisfirshear" (it's his first year) and "smothertam" (some other time). The sounds of f and r may be dropped as "hep yo sef" or "sistah." The th sound turns to f: "bofe" for both. Errant grammar includes "he be absent," "he do," "my mother, she done gone...
...rhymes with hep guy (the ch as in chap), means roughly that. It derives from dep trai, or handsome boy, which Vietnamese bar girls call all U.S. servicemen...
...enlists in the air-defense service as a medical aide and is thrown among the rude, crude Irish whom he has never known-men who have not had jobs since the Depression. In a whirl of discovery, Gavin joins a Communist theater group, meets a Protestant minister who seems hep but actually is only homo, falls in love for a night with the pathetic and beautiful young wife of a slumming millionaire who had got her man by producing a virgo-intacta medical certificate...
...leader, Norman Mailer, summed up the critique in his Presidential Papers of last year. Mailer vents his spleen more on the language than the content of liberalism. Claiming to "understand" the poor, he resents liberals who classify the underprivileged as "problems:" "These are people, not quandaries, and they're hep enough to hate the big cement housing projects that 'tolerant' progressives build so proudly." Compassionate and sincere, Humphrey may be; hep, he is not. Where Mailer calls for an artist-politician, sensitive to the people's "existential" needs, Humphrey's words suggest the enthusiasm of a Rotarian recently converted...