Word: slanging
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What he was talking about was the grim adventure last week of Frank Emery, 23, International News Service Correspondent, and Randolph Churchill, 39, of the London Daily Telegraph. After several days at "Sioggerville" (correspondents' slang for a dangerous sector), Emery and Churchill had gone to a quiet sector for a rest. There, a G.I. braced them: "You fellows always talk to the brass and never give us a break. Why don't you come on patrol with us tonight and tell the people back home how tough it is ... There won't be any danger. We know...
...years in San Quentin for a shooting. He was talking a venerable underworld cant rooted 400 years deep in Anglo-American history. Britain's Eric Partridge, a lexicographer who has strayed off the fairways of the English language to rummage in the rough (A Dictionary of Slang, Shakespeare's Bawdy), shows in his massive new Dictionary of the Underworld that even in 18th Century London a beak was a magistrate, a college was a prison, and to frisk was to search. But U.S. criminals, no mere copycats, have made their own additions to the lingo, among them...
Roughing It. Criminals originally coined cant (itself a 16th Century underworld verb meaning "to speak") to conceal their plans from eavesdroppers. When cant words pass into popular slang, as they do in the U.S. far more rapidly than Lexicographer Partridge seems to be aware, new mintings are made. Yet "the main body of cant is [more] conservative" than most people realize...
...Here, There and Everywhere, a volume of essays on slang and cant, Author Partridge subscribes to the theory that English cant had its first big bloom in the Reformation, when dispossessed English priests joined up with thieves and highwaymen and taught them scraps of Latin. By 1630, "Thieves' Latin" had all but passed away, to be replaced by the cant which fathered U.S. gangster and hobo language-a rich mulligan of native ingredients peppered lightly with foreign words, e.g., booze from the Middle Dutch bus en (to tipple), stir from the gypsy stariben (a prison...
...traditional English lessons for Chinese readers have become party-line jabberwocky. One recent issue analyzed the sentence: "Pa may be a thoughtful union man in the shop, but when he picks up a magazine, he likes to study the ads for new cars." The Review explained that "Pa" was slang for "father." Then it added: "This sentence portrays the average American as shortsighted politically ... He does not want to be informed, he wants merely to escape into a dream world in his leisure hours." With Editor Powell's homeland now fighting his friends in Korea...