Word: slang
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...language so fascinated him that, in his spare time, Headmaster Marples of Wolstanton Grammar School at Newcastle under Lyme has been jotting down campus words and finding out how they came to be. Last week Britons were chuckling over the result: a thin, bright little book entitled University Slang...
...Swot. "Slang," decides Marples, "is a form of youthful ebullience," and nothing, no matter how sacred, is safe from its inventiveness. At Oxford and Cambridge, short academic gowns have been known as rags or cover-arses, bum-curtains or tail-curtains. In the 17th Century, venerable dons were called pupil-mongers, and in the 18th they were gerund-grinders. The heads of colleges were skulls ("a skull being an ancient and desiccated head"), and their meeting place was Golgotha...
...Jowler. Like anything else, university slang has had its contagious fads. In the 17th Century, students ranged their drinking companions in a sort of academic hierarchy. A Bachelor meant a lean drunkard, a Bachelor of Law was one "that hath a purple face, inchac't with rubies," a Doctor was one that "hath a red nose." In the igth and soth Centuries, the fashion has been to add the suffixes -agger, -ogger, and -ugger to the initial consonants of all titles of dignity. Thus Queen Victoria was dubbed The Quagger; the Princes of Wales (in the case of both...
...have a mind like blotting paper," British Lexicographer Eric Partridge once said. In the past dozen years, he has blotted up enough odd facts about words ("It becomes a dreadful habit") to fill a Dictionary of Slang, a Dictionary of Cliches and a Dictionary of the Underworld. Last week the latest product of his addiction was on U.S. bookshelves. Name into Word (Macmillan; $4.50) was a colorful catalogue of "proper names that have become common property...
...hand, Frankenberg plunges directly into the work of the modern poets. In an illuminating essay on T. S. Eliot he anticipates and answers many of the questions readers are likely to ask about Eliot's poetry. He shows in detail how Eliot mixes pretentious eloquence and street slang, ancient myths and snatches of borrowed verse to portray an age of "social fright." As Frankenberg traces Eliot's poetic development from weary irony to religious faith, the reader does learn something about the moods and mechanics of modern poetry...