Word: slang
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Still, the desire for proficiency in Regency slang can only carry one so far. It does not explain why I have read every one of Heyer's romances at least once, and most of them several times more. An explanation might lie in the apolitical, reality-free spell her books cast. By the time you have turned the first few pages of a typical Heyer, you are barely sensible of the existence of the lower classes, except in terms of the hero's feudal obligations to his old retainers. Even the most determined revolutionary has to abandon class analysis...
...speech can be fresh and funny but also dirty and self-deprecating. Bruce Rodgers, who compiled more than 12,000 terms for his book The Queens' Vernacular, acknowledges that many gay activists regard gay slang as "another link in the chain which holds the homosexual enslaved...
Some linguistic purists wrongly fear slang and neologisms: these are the life signs of a language, its breath on the mirror. The danger now is something that seems new and ominous: an indifference to language, a devaluation that leaves it bloodless and zombie-like. It is as if language had ceased to be important, to be worthy of attention. Television undoubtedly has something to do with that. With its chaotic parade of images TV makes language subordinate, merely a part of the general noise. It has certainly subverted the idea of reading as entertainment. A recent study by A.C. Nielsen...
...surface-to-surface missiles. The Israelis were buoyed by the recent letter of support signed by 76 Senators. But relations between Washington and Jerusalem have nonetheless cooled to the point that Rabin's entourage held conversations at Blair House last week in lowered voices, cryptic references, Hebrew military slang and even sign language because the Israeli secret service believed the rooms were bugged. One Israeli official cited a crude Arabic expression-translated roughly as "there is a nose on our tail"-to explain the need for caution...
...years (collected in 1952 in The Shores of Light), he had a tenacious curiosity about virtually everything. This is what makes The Twenties not only a memoir but the remarkable, jagged portrait of an era. Vaudeville, Charles Lindbergh, the significance of D.H. Lawrence's small head, lists of slang, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, what it felt like to take a fast taxi ride through Manhattan while drunk, other people's family histories, the woman who kept a pet alligator in her bathtub and hypnotized it until it was limp -all are coolly, sometimes gravely considered...