Word: slanging
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...entire basis of dramatic update is problematic. Modernization presupposes limitations of audience imagination, and that undermines the very concept of drama. Drama entails entering a world not our own, and that involvement is not necessarily made smoother when the characters wear Bloomingdales' outfits and mutter in student slang. "Relevance" has little to do with decade or decor. Adaptation often weakens the playwright's intentions; Kolzak's Ghosts in surface mirrors Ibsen but in substance is worlds apart...
...Hara does manage to capture twentieth century culture in this country. He has an artist's eye for detail: clothing, automobiles, popular music, slang--all are carefully described in his books. And it is for a purpose. When an O'Hara character drives a Buick or adopts dated slang, it tells something about his personality and social standing...
...Hara worked hard at his craft. He retained a keen interest in current slang, and the 1972 supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary credits him as the source of 11 words, including the now familiar "fuck-up." He was particularly concerned with the visual composition of the printed paragraph. As a young writer, he spent hours over A Farewell to Arms, using Hemingway's paragraphing as a model for his own work...
Still, the desire for proficiency in Regency slang can only carry one so far. It does not explain why I have read every one of Heyer's romances at least once, and most of them several times more. An explanation might lie in the apolitical, reality-free spell her books cast. By the time you have turned the first few pages of a typical Heyer, you are barely sensible of the existence of the lower classes, except in terms of the hero's feudal obligations to his old retainers. Even the most determined revolutionary has to abandon class analysis...
...speech can be fresh and funny but also dirty and self-deprecating. Bruce Rodgers, who compiled more than 12,000 terms for his book The Queens' Vernacular, acknowledges that many gay activists regard gay slang as "another link in the chain which holds the homosexual enslaved...