Word: slang
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...Little European Kingdom. . . . Let Us Call It Langenstein." The music is cacophonous except for "I Found a Song" which decorative Nancy McCord and spry little Guy Robertson spend most of their time singing. For humor Librettist Herendeen has relied heavily on the outlandish sound of U. S. slang in dreamy old Langenstein...
From his list, Publisher Funk wisely omitted any definition of "jargon," gave no examples. If he meant the ten men who had coined the greatest number of slang words, his list would have been hard to defend. Astute commentators doubted whether any of the ten had ever coined any slang...
...late Sime Silverman, founder-publisher of Variety, helped popularize such technical theatre talk as "wow," "panic," and "flop" but it never got far from Broadway. H. L. Mencken coined expressions like "Bible Belt," "booboisie," "Yahwah," which became part of the language of his imitative admirers but not slang. Cartoonist T. A. Dorgan ("Tad") put a little dog in his pictures who barked "balogna"; the term was not, like some of Tad's, his own. "Blessed event," "phttf and "middle-aisle" by Winchell are too conscious to be slang; "whoopee," old when he first used it, is already obsolete. "Bugs...
...Real slang is invented by persons antisocial enough to resent commonplace terms but too ignorant to use synonyms. Publisher Funk's list necessarily omitted the coiners of such plain and useful words as "washout," "lousy," "okay," "beat it," "razz." Last week the fatherly New York Times which never permits slang to appear in its columns commented thus: "Good slang is 'sock on the jaw' and poor slang is 'economic Neanderthals' both from the collection of General Hugh Johnson. The first is as near to the soil as corned beef & cabbage; the second is recherch...
Regardless of age, good slang always sounds new. "Chisel" is 100 years old. "Yellow streak" is as fresh today as when Christy Mathewson put it into the language 30 years ago. In the 1890's Conan Doyle used "Don't try to play me for a sucker...