Word: slanging
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...Miguel Pinero fills his script with the street-wise argot of Harlem and the South Bronx that gives the dialogue an authentic ring. The effective color and accuracy of the ghetto-flavored jive should hardly come as a surprise; Pinero owes this ability to evoke a particular brand of slang to his own experience as an inmate at Sing Sing Prison. The crisp repartee that dominates the opening moments of Short Eyes soon becomes a bit much, however, reflecting the actual origins of the work...
Eric Partridge, to coin a phrase, has done it again. At 83, the scholar of slang and connoisseur of cliches has produced his 16th lexicon, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases. Its 3,000 entries are liberally defined as sayings that have "caught on and please the public." Here are the phrases that trip resoundingly off the tongue: "Don't just stand there-do something!"; "Attaboy!" Here are the immortal quotes: "Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes"; "All quiet on the Western front." Plus those '60s buzz words: "Cool it!"; "Tell it like...
Soon afterward, he turned his love affair with the English language into a profession. They have been an item for 47 years, spanning forays into sexual innuendo (Shakespeare's Bawdy), A Dictionary of Cliches, and Partridge's most famous work, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Until an operation several years ago left him quite frail, Partridge spent his days in carrel K-1 of the British Museum Library, reading everything from pulp novels to plays (consuming "about 80% of all comedies written in English between 1530 and 1970" for his latest work). In the tradition...
...intimate acquaintance of several English tongues, Partridge was born into the proper English of New Zealand and was introduced to Australian slang as a student at the University of Queensland. He later served with the Australian army in World War I-thereby learning the military idiom-before ending his linguistic tour in the rarefied dialect of Oxford. To fill in the gaps, he relies on an extended network of correspondents. They also keep him abreast of changes that "on balance, I should say are to the good." He particularly likes "wonderful American expressions such as skyscraper" but dislikes the "pitiable...
...film's documentary-style depiction of the prison's multiracial social strata and daily routine is fascinating, but it is Short Eyes' title character who gives the film its thrust. "Short Eyes" is prison slang for child molester, the one kind of felon all the others deplore, and when Prisoner Clark Davis (Bruce Davison) arrives at the Tombs, the moral and emotional tensions of the cell block are brought into powerful relief. Like Eugene O'Neill's Iceman, Davis is a crackerjack theatrical device; thanks to Davison's finely shaded performance, he is also...