[Ads-l] Can't hurt, may help.

[Jonathan Lighter]

That's because it isn't good enough to be counted as "select."

In fact, 99% of Monteleone's book is clearly derivative of earlier amateur
glossaries (an old slang custom).

I had rare need or occasion to cite it.  The sole ex. I can think of is
"gangbang," v., for which Monteleone was my earliest source.

The complete, non-select bibliography ran to something like 6,000 titles.
Just think, I could have been partying!

(Books and periodical titles, that is.  No articles.)

JL

On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 3:20 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Can't hurt, may help.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Criminal Slang: The Vernacular of the Underground Lingo
> https://books.google.com/books?isbn=3D1584773006
> Captain Vincent Joseph Monteleone - c1949; rep. 2003 - =E2=80=8EPreview
> Criminal Slang: An Introduction Bryan A. Garner
>
> "Oddly, Captain Monteleone's compilation isn't mentioned in the Select
> Annotated Bibliography that J.E. Lighter included in his magisterial book
> on slang, _The Random House Dictionary of American Slang_ (1994). Even more
> surprisingly, it doesn't appear to have been cited anywhere in the
> three-volume (and counting <sob!>) text."
> - Bryan A. Garner
>
> It looks like you made a mistake, Jon. But, so did he.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --=20
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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