They Don't Speak Our Language; Amazon follies (continued)

[Dennis R. Preston]

Mike,

They ripped my old Professor off for "The Sting," but he won quite a
lucrative case against them. As I recall the settlement amount was never
revealed. I agree that his work on "seamy-side" US English is much
under-cited. His work was not only authentically collected but often
presentated in an ethnographically detailed way. Hadn't been for him and
Fred Cassidy, I'd still be down in the coal mines.

dInIs



>Barry:
>
>H.T. Webster's recurrent captions for his well-known cartoons are deeply
>embedded in American English, and I'm glad to see him get the credit he
>so richly deserves.
>
>David Maurer, however, also deserves credit.  I believe that many of the
>underworld words from page 30, col. 2 came from Maurer's work with
>Federal prisoners at Lexington, Ky.  That's where Maurer collected the
>language of confidence men, and the fantastic stories that went with it,
>that appears in his "The Big Con".  (Yes, "The Big Con" is the book
>Hollywood plagiarized for the plot and the details of "The Sting".)
>
>Check Maurer's "Language of the underworld", which republishes some of
>his early articles that antedate the citation from H.T. Webster.
>
>I'd cite chapter and verse if I could get at my copy of Maurer's book.
>Unfortunately, it's hopelessly buried in the crates where I jammed the
>books I used to keep on campus.  Half a semester into my retirement, I
>was given ten days' notice to empty my old office, so that it could be
>converted into classroom space.  I simply wasn't ready for that: Just a
>month before, I had been assured that I would continue sharing that
>office for at least a year or two with the colleague with whom I had
>shared space for twenty years.  (She got bumped, too, into something
>called an office that looks more like a broom closet -- it's all of
>eight feet wide.)  Everything got jammed into whatever boxes and crates
>I could find, moved to our house in several trips with a large, borrowed
>pickup truck, and dumped here with no plans and no real accomodation.
>Most of those things have now been standing on my front porch for a year
>as I slowly create space for the contents of two or three crates each
>month.  I'm still angry at the shabby treatment, but what the hell.
>
>Let's not be that kind of shabby with Maurer's classic work!
>
>-- mike salovesh      <salovesh at niu.edu>     PEACE !!!
>
>Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>>
>> THEY DON'T SPEAK OUR LANGUAGE
>>
>>      On of the interesting articles I've spotted in my scan of the
>> Reader's  Digest is "They Don't Speak Our Language," by H. T. Webster,
>> January 1934, pages 29-31, reprinted from Forum, December 1933.  On
>> page 112, it's  explained about the author:  "Besides his Timid Soul
>> and They Don't Speak Our Language series, the cartoonist has several
>> other recurrent captions which have become almost household phrases,
>> such as 'Life's Darkest Moment,' 'The Thrill That Comes Once in a
>> Lifetime,' 'The Boy Who Made Good,' 'How to Torture Your Wife,' etc."
>>
>>      This is from page 30, col. 2:
>>
>>      I'll give you the glossary and you can roll your own story.
>> Peterman-safeblower; keister-suit case; power-explosive; case the
>> joint-looks over the place; skeletons in-uses skeleton keys;
>> soup-nitroglycerin; jug-safe; dark horse-night watchman; gun-crook;
>> bangster-drug addict; snowed up-full of dope; gives the heat-shoots;
>> heap-auto; gander-lookout; calling cards-finger prints; crib-safe;
>> mobster-crook; rapped-sentenced; hot squat-electric chair; lip-lawyer;
>> spring-free; lying in state-imprisoned; dance hall-death house.


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736