Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Book Report: Flappers 2 Rappers by Tom Dalzell

Book review number 2, friends, and this one's another nonfiction title since the only junk fiction I have currently is Deathstar Voyage, a late 1960s piece of science fiction that has nothing to do with Star Wars. So, while hiding from the unattractive storyline in that piece of sci-fi, I read Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang by Tom Dalzell.

Personally, I like a bit of linguistics and loving Norma Loquendi every once in a while. So I delved into this piece, which I picked up in June at Powell's in Chicago (which explains why the link above goes to Powell's and not Amazon). Its chapters reflect decades from the 1920s to the 1990s, with some decades (1950s, 1960s) split to reflect different subcultures within those decades, and others (1970s-1980s) lumped into a single chapter. Each chapter begins with a short essay thing that captures the spirit of the times/subculture. After that, you're treated to a list of words, like a glossary, and a couple of sidebars that collect synonyms for common concepts like "good," "girlfriend/boyfriend," "greeting," and the like. At the end of each chapter, the author provides little article things that evaluate certain archetypal words from the period and trace their lineage. Good structure.

However, it's obvious that the author slapped together this quick-read, coffee-table-linguistics book. The fact that glossary entries replicate themselves, unself-consciously, from chapter to chapter, as though "gasper" were a new term for a cigarette in the 1940s, when the preceding chapter called it the lingo of the soda jerk.

It was only when I got to the 1980s, my youth, that I realized all was not well. In the chapter that lumps the 1980s along with the 1970s, I spotted several errors:

"animal" (p 168) attributed to the movie Animal House (1978) when The Muppet Show debuted, and popularized, the term earlier;
"waldo," (p 184) defined as "Out of it, as in 'That new kid in Biology class is totally waldo--clueless to the max.' Derived from the popular Where's Waldo picture books of the 1980s...." Pardon me, sir, but Where's Waldo seems to stem from 1987 whereas I distinctly remember the perjorative term applied to me in 1985 by the punks in middle school. Oh, and Waldo was a character in the video for "Hot for Teacher" from the Van Halen album 1984, which came out strangely enough in 1984;
"Hasta" explained in a sidebar on p 185 as "from the Spanish 'hasta luego' or 'hasta la vista,' popularized by the movie The Terminator...." Um, no, "Hasta la vista, baby," was from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991);
Misspelling of Eddie Murphy's name as Eddy Murphy (p 195)

And these represent a sample of the incongruities and typographical mistakes I found in that single chapter.

Suddenly, the author's research (regurgitation of others' research+some faulty memories, perhaps) is at odds with known facts and my own memory. Suddenly, I couldn't trust the author for the era I knew, which means I probably can't trust him for the eras I don't. Crap! This book was a waste of time. Sloppy research, fanciful assertions, and typographical errors are intolerable when they directly impact the veracity of the subject matter, which is the usage and spelling of words themselves.

Still, the book might illustrate how words never leave vogue, assuming that some of the words and phrases ascribed to the 1920s were really used then. Based on the fluid, evolutionary nature of slang, I don't think any one of us would be completely out of touch if we stepped through a time-warp into a previous era, or vice versa.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:04 PM