Press: Doctor & Duke

Slangsters

To editors and columnists. President Wilfred John Funk of Funk & Wagnalls, who writes light verse, publishes the Literary Digest and gets out a dictionary, last week tossed an exciting subject for controversy. He made up a list of the "ten modern Americans who have done most to keep American jargon alive." His ten:

Sime Silverman

H. L. Mencken

T. A. Dorgan

Walter Winchell

Arthur ("Bugs") Baer

Ring Lardner

Damon Runyon

Gelett Burgess

George Ade

Gene Buck

From his list, Publisher Funk wisely omitted any definition of "jargon," gave no examples. If he meant the ten men who had coined the greatest number of slang words, his list would have been hard to defend. Astute commentators doubted whether any of the ten had ever coined any slang at all.

The late Sime Silverman, founder-publisher of Variety, helped popularize such technical theatre talk as "wow," "panic," and "flop" but it never got far from Broadway. H. L. Mencken coined expressions like "Bible Belt," "booboisie," "Yahwah," which became part of the language of his imitative admirers but not slang. Cartoonist T. A. Dorgan ("Tad") put a little dog in his pictures who barked "balogna"; the term was not, like some of Tad's, his own. "Blessed event," "phttf and "middle-aisle" by Winchell are too conscious to be slang; "whoopee," old when he first used it, is already obsolete. "Bugs" Baer's small Hearst column contains wisecracks like "ears like handles on a loving cup" which are the opposite of slang. Ring Lardner, who died a week after Sime Silverman, was usually careful to avoid inventions of his own, stuck close to the jargon of baseball. Columnist Damon Runyon mixes authentic underworld talk with invented freaks. Gelett Burgess' The Goops contributed a less valuable word than Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. George Ade's Fables in Slang were funnier than real slang. Gene Buck, who, Mr. Funk said last week, had once told him he "was responsible for 100 words that are now current in the language" was guilty of a songwriter's exaggeration.

Real slang is invented by persons antisocial enough to resent commonplace terms but too ignorant to use synonyms. Publisher Funk's list necessarily omitted the coiners of such plain and useful words as "washout," "lousy," "okay," "beat it," "razz." Last week the fatherly New York Times which never permits slang to appear in its columns commented thus: "Good slang is 'sock on the jaw' and poor slang is 'economic Neanderthals' both from the collection of General Hugh Johnson. The first is as near to the soil as corned beef & cabbage; the second is recherché. Ninety-nine per cent of the accredited slang inventions are recherche."

Regardless of age, good slang always sounds new. "Chisel" is 100 years old. "Yellow streak" is as fresh today as when Christy Mathewson put it into the language 30 years ago. In the 1890's Conan Doyle used "Don't try to play me for a sucker."