aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Slang rules!

P.J. O’Rourke doesn’t much like leslie Savan’s Slam Dunks and No-Brainers. I won’t be reading it. But I sure did enjoy the review:

A little information makes any book about language a pleasure. Very little information is found in “Slam Dunks.” Much effort is expended citing the use of catchphrases. Not much effort is expended discovering their sources or tracing their disseminations. Savan quotes from Charles Mackay’s brief chapter on slang in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” but she doesn’t seem to have read it. Certainly she didn’t absorb Mackay’s sense of how “the favorite slang phrase . . . throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour.” Savan is apparently ignorant of Eric Partridge’s “Dictionary of Catch Phrases.” Here she would have found that a Macaulay Culkin “Home Alone” squelch she particularly deplores has a 100-year-old fun and frolicsomeness antecedent. And Savan writes that “exactly when cool jelled into the word we know today is difficult to say.” It is not difficult to say upon looking into The Oxford English Dictionary. “Assured and unabashed in demeanor . . . calmly and deliberately audacious or impudent” dates to the 1820’s. But the O.E.D. is not in Savan’s bibliography, which contains “Jones, Gerard. ‘Honey, I’m Home!: Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream’ “ and “Moore, Michael. ‘Dude, Where’s My Country?’ “