Word: slanging
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pinochle season (garment-district slang)-the slack season
DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG (669 pp.)-Compiled by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner - Crowell...
...careful garden of hardy perennials and occasional exotics, cultivated by a corps of devoted lexicographers, is consistently challenged by a weedy invasion of the vulgate. Professors may still protest, but the public -and most authorities-tends to silence them. Says one philologist: "It was once thought that most slang came from the underworld, but nowadays a great deal of it comes from the average middle-class types who belong to golf clubs and bridge clubs and like to go skindiving...
Remarkably enough, there have been few really satisfactory dictionaries of American slang. H. L. Mencken made his prodigious contribution (The American Language), and Lester Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark produced their useful but not fundamental compendium (The American Thesaurus of Slang). Standing up well against the competition, Dr. Harold Wentworth, editor of the American Dialect Dictionary, and Stuart Berg Flexner, Cornell and University of Louisville philologist, have produced a handy, invaluable reference work that may well emerge as the standard in the field. In short, the authors have done a remarkably fly and dicty...
...book is selective rather than complete-according to Author Flexner, only 8,000 words are listed out of a possible 45,000 -they will probably agree that the selections in most cases are shrewd and useful. The authors have worked both sides of the street in every major slang-producing area-advertising, journalism, sports, show business, politics, Wall Street, the underworld, the armed forces, teenagers, jazz musicians, racial minorities and Texas. The contributions from Negro and Yiddish slang are particularly striking. Prudes may be disturbed by the volume of sexual references, but there is a fascination about the many different...