Word: slang
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False Sentimentality. To use a phrase from current teenage slang, Algren has gone ape, real ape. The pity of all this is that the wheedling, folksy tone of the huckster ("I've learned a few tricks of the trade myself, such as adding an 's' when you want to show there is more than one of something") comes from the mouth of a man who once had a real gold watch to sell and not a brass turnip...
...thing is to sound innocent but almost have sexy adventures. And sound on the inside. Like mentioning that daddy is a noble lord every so often and using plenty of Mayfair slang. I tell how debs get through dull parties by hiding War and Peace in the loo of the Dorchester where the dances are given. But a girl has to have lived or something. Otherwise she'll be a drip. So I thought I'd throw in some sentences like. "Lesbians aren't my swooniest subject." I mean, it came naturally after I had that woman...
...scarcely a soul showed up at the station, for in Sanlucar and nearby Jerez de la Frontera 3,900 workers were out on strike for a $2.50 daily wage (a 50? boost), portal-to-portal pay between the vineyard and home, and two-not one-daily cigars, the slang word for the workers' traditional 20-minute siesta...
...plot is unimportant: an old guard (Walter Macken) and a young guard (Patrick McGoohan) wait tensely for a reprieve to arrive for the quare fellow (prison slang for a condemned man), and when it fails to arrive they lead him grimly to the gallows. What matters is the compelling illusion of life as it is lived in an average anachronistic prison: the natural humanity of the prisoners and their guards, the subhuman system that makes them beasts and keepers, the soul-destroying hatred of either for other, the teeth that glitter cruelly behind every smile, the moral stench of slowly...
...sudden crackdowns make one year's gut next year's skull-cracker. Thus, each fall the avid "gut-seeker," as Harvard calls him, has to sniff out anew the telltale signs: heavy class attendance, especially by football players, and a proneness to refer to the course in slang, such as "Spots and Dots" (modern art), "Cops and Robbers" (criminology), "Pots and Pans" (homemaking), "Nuts and Sluts'' (abnormal personality), "Cokes and Smokes" (religion), ''Cowboys and Indians" (history of the West), or "Mint Juleps" (history of the South...