Word: cockney
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Whatever the logic of it, it makes a decidedly good show. Major Barbara is full of marvelous ideological eye-foolers and glittering intellectual pinwheels and dialectical tugs of war. Beyond that, Shaw has mingled bright drawing-room chatter with sharp cockney unpleasantries, thrown in here an amusing upper-clawss idiot, there a bellowing lower-class bully...
...Which got its name from Cockney attempts at saying "The Infanta of Castile...
...from a caricature of Edwardian elegance to the zoot padding of a Harlem hepcat. Their hair is elaborately and expensively coiffured in long, wavy styles that range from the "D.A." (for Duck's Arse) to the "TV Roll" and the "Tony Curtis." Their jargon is a mixture of Cockney rhyming slang and U.S. jive talk in which a road is a "frog" (from the phrase frog-and-toad, which rhymes with road), a suit is a "whistle" (from whistle-and-flute), and a girl is a "bird...
...Soldiers Never Die, by Wolf Mankowitz. A richly comic novel about a Cockney indestructible and his mute pal, who trip up Britain's Welfare State (TIME, Sept...
...snooty modification of the inarticulate. Born in London's East End, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper, Mankowitz took himself on a scholarship to Cambridge, ran a shop, became an authority on Wedgwood china, worked as a film scenarist. He writes best about what he knows best: the cockney. His unforgettable cockney Quixote belongs not (as Novelist Elizabeth Bowen suggests on the book jacket) with James Joyce but with Joyce Gary's articulate and wonderful crew of loudmouthed Londoners...