Word: slang
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...London young Deodato, escaped from friarhood, seeks his lost identity, gets involved in a slummy, fancy piece of Victorian poisoning, yearns for the beautiful young woman, and exposes himself to some of the deadliest mid-19th-Century slang to be found in any 20th-century novel...
Dale Curran's descriptions of theatrical and ballroom jazz are excellent. Because he likes true jazz so well, he is not one-tenth so good at telling about it. He avoids, to be sure, those indulgences in technological slang with which customers embarrass the second trumpeter. But he does let Jeff Walters say what Jeff Walters could never have said: "The world needs beauty...
Since World War 1, schoolboy slang has been enriched by army expressions (e.g., gadget, posh, to do the dirty, to scrounge, to -wangle') and by Americanisms (lay off, scram). Most of it, however, is still the schoolboys' own, often unintelligible to outsiders. A Bootham boy, for example, says: "Just had a juice-meeting with My Lord for tuzhering a bug." Translation: "I've just been reprimanded by the Headmaster for breaking an electric-light bulb." Some other outlandish schoolboy expressions: belly-go-round (a belt), Medes and Persians (the practice of jumping...
Etonians use relatively little slang, get most of it from Latin. Some Etonisms: bumble (small beer with raisins), furk (an illegal football kick), lush (sweets), nant (a swimmer), pec (money-from pe-cunia), Pop (famed Eton society, from popina, a cookshop, where meetings were originally held), sock...
Unrivaled for the richness and variety of its slang is Winchester, whose famed founder, William, of Wykeham (1373), decreed that its boys should talk Latin. Winchester finds it necessary to supply new boys with a glossary of its slang. Some Wykehamisms: abs (absent), chiz (cheat), cud (pretty, from couth, opposite of uncouth), infra-dig (scornful-to sport infra-dig duck, to look scornful), glope (spit), swink (sweat), thoke (idle in bed), ziph (a kind of pig Latin), plant (sock someone with a football...