Word: slanging
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...more usual " Oh Lord, here's a classic!" manner, seemed highly successful. As successful as could be, considering the fact that most of the Elizabethan cross-fire and comic patter, has, like nearly all good topical stuff, lost much of its sting with the passage of the slang and catchwords of its day. The plot (mistaken identities) was, of course, a hardy perennial even before Shakespeare- and there are few " familiar quotations " in the Comedy of Errors to help or hinder the audience into a feeling that they are being educated instead of amused. But the misadventures...
...Morning and evening they sang Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, but the words were equivalent to ' Save your ammunition.' The Eleventh Division (known as the Crack Eleventh) often sang Bringing in the Sheaves, the words of which had the same meaning as the American doughboy's slang phrase, ' Get your...
...editor-in-chief of the undergraduate paper. Wide contacts with the facts of life have given him a love of people in the mass of crowds, of ugliness, of brutality. More than any other American poet, with his curious rythms sprung from Negro and Indian sources, with his slang and his brassy effects, he has, I believe, reached the heart of the American people. If you have never heard Sandburg sing folk songs of America, bending over his guitar, white locks down over his forehead, dreaming of hoboes by a fire under some abandoned freight car, you have missed...
This somewhat ambiguous statement becomes much clearer when referred to the pages of "THE SLANG DICTIONARY; OR, THE VULGAR WORDS, STREET PHRASES, AND "FAST" EXPRESSIONS OF HIGH AND LOW SOCIETY--LONDON: 1867. Here then is the explanation...
...American as she is spoke" has gradually become a different language from the "English wot the Tommies speak", and together the have taken up hundreds of slang expression in rebellion against literary English. This tendency has gone so far that when the novel "Babbitt" was introduced to England it was found necessary to print a glossary of "Americanisms" in the back; and recently a book on "The American Language" was published by Henry Louis Mencken, giving a host of slang terms that have come into use in this country. But it is to the advantage of everyone from American cabdriver...