Word: slang
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Several memos deal with a sensitive topic-money. Both Haldeman and Strachan used the same slang as the underworld when discussing finances. Zeroes were dropped from large sums; cash is called "green." Wrote Strachan: "Of the 1.2 fund Kalmbach has a balance of 900 [meaning $900,000]-plus under his personal control." Strachan presented to Haldeman the recommendation of Stans, Dean and Herbert Kalmbach, the President's private lawyer and a major fund raiser, that "690" be put in legal committees and that "only the 230 green would be held under Kalmbach's personal control." Haldeman approved with...
...meant then what it does now. In the first Elizabethan world - when there were some 40 euphemisms for sexual organs (including will, dial and den)-almost every passage twinkled with lewdness. Like today's cheerless smut, the Elizabethan bawdiness was both deplored and exploited. The nonsexual slang has traveled with greater success: here are the witches in Macbeth, telling each other to "cool it"; here is Anthony in Julius Caesar: "I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,/ Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,/ To stir men's blood. I only speak right...
Quick Hit. Last fall The Family found a home as resident company at Riverside Church, an interdenominational congregation in Manhattan. The church got a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce Piñero's Short Eyes. Short Eyes -prison slang for a child molester -plays out the ostracism and eventual murder of a prison newcomer charged with the one intolerable crime. Papp first saw the Riverside production at the urging of Actress Colleen Dewhurst, who had become interested in the group while it was forming. The play opened last month at the Public...
...cross-country voyage from Los Angeles to New York. Patty and Maxene, costumed in a sort of WAC usherette motif, are lovably running the train's U.S.O. canteen. The 40s collage includes precautionary Army VD lectures, Glenn Miller band impersonations, little jokes about "going all the way," period slang ("cow juice and Java") and a likable fantasy of America's postwar dreams-Esther Williams bathing beauties backstroking across the dry stage...
...champion pedants in any language, he says, turn out to be heavy users of slang. Adolescents, applying slang to test "who belongs to the group and who is an intruder," are, Farb contends, "more severe about standards for its correct usage" than the fussiest schoolmarm...