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...access to important facts about the organization if he would sign the security pledge. He agreed. First, he learned that he had been judged "witty" (CIA jargon for the one who passes security clearance) and second, that nearly all of N.S.A.'s funds came from "the firm" (code slang...
Root of Rage. The new Manheim translation makes more accessible to U.S. readers the astonishing virtuosity of Céline's style, which broke out of the formal gavotte of French grammar and syntax-and used all the resources of thieves' argot, slum slang, and the shoptalk of pimps, prostitutes, bums, and pickpockets-to demonstrate the power and quality of his love of life and hatred for those who must live it. Coprological images-excrement, pus, gangrene, all the humiliating ironies of bodily decay-crowded this doctor's mind. Still, his language no longer shocks; today...
Both the Put-On and the Gross-Out are part of the Now Generation's "language bag"-a constantly changing lingo brewed from psychological jargon, show-biz slang and post-Chatterley obscenity. What the 1920s admiringly called a "good-time Charlie" is today Freudianized as a "womb baby," one who cannot kick the infantile desire for instant gratification. Anyone who substitutes perspiration for inspiration is a "wonk"-derived from the British "wonky," meaning out of kilter. The quality an earlier generation labeled cool is "tough," "kicky," "bitchin'," or "groovy." But the most meaningful facet of In-Talk...
...unabashed cowardice confounds the military. The enemy colonel, a man of some humor, decides to let him stay in his greenhouse-with the remark that if all his countrymen were like that, the war would be over very soon. The greenhouse thus becomes a "glass house," British soldiers' slang for a military prison. But it is a greenhouse to the prisoner. In civil life he had been a noted amateur gardener. Deftly, he sets about restoring to life the plants he lives with...
Hopping purposefully in and out of the open cockpits is Anti-hero George Peppard, cast as Stachel, an upstart fly-boy whose killer instincts devastate both friend and foe before he can claim "the Blue Max," pilot slang for Germany's equivalent of the Medal of Honor.* In the novel by Jack D. Hunter, Stachel was a murderous, alcoholic blackmailer, but a trio of adapters has softened the edges of Peppard's role, following the unwritten Hollywood law that a hero-heel must be boyish, winning, and a terror abed. As a nod to custom, death...