Word: argot
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...Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess has written what looks like a nasty little shocker but is really that rare thing in English letters-a philosophical novel. The point may be overlooked because the hero, a teen-age monster, tells all about everything in nadsat, a weird argot that seems to be all his own. Nadsat is neither gibberish nor a Joycean exercise. It serves to put Alex where he belongs-half in and half out of the human race...
...jazzmen are as concerned as the whites about the effects of prejudice in either direction. Querulous Trumpeter Miles Davis has always insisted on hiring his musicians on talent only, although he concedes that "some colored cats bitched" when he added white Saxophonist Lee Konitz to his group. (In jazz argot, the pressure applied by Negro bigots to Negroes who will not subscribe to Crow Jim is called Crow Crow; its opposite is Jim Jim.) Says Negro Saxophonist Sonny Stitt: "Man. if a guy can play, that's all that counts. I don't care if his skin...
...combination of Sydney Greenstreet bullying Clark Gable in The Hucksters and Rock Hudson seducing Doris Day in Lover Come Back. In the public mind, the advertising business is firmly established as a grey-flannel world of three-Gibson lunches, three-button jackets, unabashed throat slicing and zany argot ("Let's smear some of this on the cat and see if she licks...
Nobody is sure just what it is, or even what its name implies: according to various experts, the Portuguese slang expression bossa nova can mean "the latest thing" or "the new beat" or "the new wrinkle." Bossa literally means a protuberance, but in the argot of Rio, it connotes a natural talent or knack, as in the line, "The Duke has a lot of bossa." The only points everybody is agreed on are that 1) bossa nova is a weird crossbreeding of cool jazz with chili-peppered Latin rhythms and 2) it is big, and getting even bigger...
...benefit of a London newsman bemused by U.S. argot, Novelist Norman (The Naked and the Dead) Mailer, 38, set out to distinguish between hipsters and beatniks. Although the two groups "share a common experience and understand each other's language." pontificated Mailer, "they're utterly different. The hipster is a man of action, always on the move; the beatnik is contemplative, an amateur philosopher. Among world figures today, Kennedy is hip but won't admit it and Khrushchev is hip but doesn't know it." What about British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan? "Irreclaimably square...