Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms - Hardcover

Dickson, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802715311 ISBN 13: 9780802715319

Publisher: Walker Books, 2006

Synopsis

Unlike most slang dictionaries that list entries alphabetically, Slang takes on modern American English one topic at a time, from "auctionese" to "computerese", the drug trade and sports slang. Slang was originally published by Pocket Books in 1990 in paperback (ISBN 0671672517, out of print) and revised in 1998 in hardcover and paperback (ISBN 0671549200 and 0671549197; hc out of print soon after publication, pb in print until 2005). The new Slang has 50% new material, including new chapters on slang associated with work cubicles, gaming, hip hop, and coffeehouses. Dickson brings slang into the twenty-first century with such blogger slang as TMPMITW, which stands for "the most powerful man in the world" (the president). Whether you want to be privy to the inside banter of the boardroom, backroom or the Washington Beltway, Slang is an indispensable resource, and a lot of fun. Slang is evidence that the spoken language is continually changing to meet new needs for verbal expressions, tailored to changing realities and perceptions.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Dickson, coauthor of The Bonus Army, has written numerous language books and dictionaries, including War Slang, The Congress Dictionary, and The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary. He has written for Smithsonian, Esquire, The Nation, Town & Country, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. A founding member and former president of Washington Independent writers and a member of the National Press Club, Dickson is a contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine and a former consulting editor at Merriam-Webster, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Chapter One: Advertising and Public Relations

Let's Try a Few and See If They Repeat 'Em

Advertising, for its part, has so prostrated itself on the altar of word worship that it has succeeded in creating a whole language of its own. And while Americans are bilingual in this respect, none can confuse the language of advertising with their own.

-- William H. Whyte Jr. and the editors of Fortune, in Is Anybody Listening? (Simon & Schuster, 1952)

Ads for computers, cars, vacations, phone service, and liquor are popping up faster than you can say World Wide Web. All the big Web sites have them -- Netscape, Yahoo, Pathfinder, HotWired, CNet, ZDNet, ESPN SportsZone, Playboy -- and so do many of the smaller ones.

-- Michelle V. Rafter on Internet advertising, the Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1995

In the late 1950s the nation went gaga over the slangy metaphoric hyperbole of Mad Ave. The phrases were dubbed "gray flannelisms" (from the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) by syndicated columnist Walter Winchell, while fellow columnist Dorothy Kilgallen called them "ad agencyisms." They were all convoluted, and most were based on whether or not something -- an ad, a campaign, a slogan, etc. -- would work. The most famous flannelism was "Let's send it up the flagpole and see if they salute it," but columnists and TV personalities repeated hundreds more with relish. A few of many:

• Let's pull up the periscope and see where we're at.
• I see feathers on it but it's still not flying.
• Let's toss it around and see if it makes salad.
• Let's guinea-pig that one.
• Let's roll some rocks and see what crawls out.
• Well, the oars are in the water and we're headed upstream.
• Let's drop this down the well and see what kind of splash it makes.

Were these real or were they created to get a line in a newspaper column? It would seem that they were more real than hype. No less an observer than John Crosby of the old New York Herald Tribune deemed them "the curiously inventive (and, in some cases, remarkably expressive) language of the advertising industry." This is not to say a few were not created for outside consumption. In late 1957, when the Soviet Union put a dog in earth orbit, the metaphoric handstand that attracted attention was "Let's shoot a satellite into the client's orbit and see if he barks."

That fad has passed (at least the public side of it has) and things are a little less colorful in advertising and public relations, but plenty remains, and something new is on the horizon, the vast potential for advertising on the Internet, for which there is already a nascent slang with such terms as banner, button, click-through, hit, impression pixels, and traffic tracking being applied to cyberadvertising.

Copyright © 1990, 1998 by Paul Dickson

Edition details

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0802715311
• ISBN 13: 9780802715319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432