Parnassian sources such as The New York Review of Books are not neglected either—corn-holed and do (in the sexual sense) appeared there, per Lighter. The Atlantic Monthly supplies the first citation for doghouse, musician’s slang for “double-bass” (1920). Esquire pops up as a locus for a rare 1976 use of dog water, which, Lighter informs us, means “clear drops of seminal fluid.” The New Yorker makes many appearances, some for nice old words like brads (“cash”), cluckhead, and cheesy. (Lighter’s crew has, by the way, come up with a sentence employing cheesy that predates by over thirty years the first cheesy citation in the Supplement to the OED. In 1863 someone named Massett wrote: “The orchestra consisting of the fiddle — a very cheezy flageolet, played by a gentleman with one eye — a big drum, and a triangle.”) The New Yorker also substantiates the word fucking used adverbially, thanks to its recent explosion of profanity, and it furnishes two separate nuances of asshole dating from 1993.
For obvious reasons, though, the magazine that is most often quoted in The Historical Dictionary of American Slang is The National Lampoon. Lighter and his crew have combed its back issues carefully in quest of elusive flannel-buzzards, and they have not gone unrewarded. Yet here the editors must have had difficulty at times deciding which words were merely “nonce figuration,” to be excluded from the dictionary, and which words had obtained a “currency independent of the speaker.” The fact that The National Lampoon uses cock-locker or flog the dolphin or get your bananas peeled (all with sexual meanings) is taken to be an indication that this recherché vocabulary enjoyed a currency independent of the humorist during the period in question. It may have; Lampoon writers were expert listeners and diligent field-workers. But they were, as well, habitués of the reference room; in some cases at least, one suspects that they simply pulled down a few slang tomes, found a “ghost word” they thought was funny, and resurrected it for the greater good. P. J. O’Rourke recently told a lunch-table that he owns a whole shelf of unconventional lexicography; he and Michael O’Donohue, another Lampoon contributor and professional slangfarber, were particularly fond of one major thesaurus dating from (he thought) the thirties — by which he surely meant Berrey and Van den Bark’s huge “ephemera”-filled collection from the forties. In this way, out of the dried mud-flats of old reference books, to one-time creative placement in a humor magazine, to further climate-controlled stasis in Lighter’s Dictionary, are some words blessed with “currency” after a single recycling. And the language is happier for it.
Using The Historical Dictionary of American Slang will probably have long-term side effects. A three-week self-immersion in Lighter’s initial volume significantly altered this suggestible reader’s curse-patterns. I swore more often and more incomprehensibly while reading it than ever before; the “Captain Haddock syndrome” was especially noticeable while driving. (Captain Haddock is the character in the Tintin series who, when drunk, showers puzzling nonce-abuse on people: Poltroons! Iconoclasts! Bashi-bazouks!) To a slow motorist (with windows closed, of course, so he couldn’t hear), I would call out, “Go, you little scum — jockey!”- or “corn-pad” or “dirt-bonnet.” None of these formulae is to be found in Lighter (at least, there is no reason to expect scum-jockey to appear in Volume III), but reading Volume I made me say them. Furthermore, under Lighter’s fluid spell I spent several hours working on a matrix of related insults:
(An x indicates an existing piece of slang; a question mark indicates a plausible compound, which may or may not appear in the future. Whether there is any linguistic point to building such a predictive matrix is an open question.)
Some of these behavioral aberrations will pass in time, but it is at least possible that by the spring of 1997, when the final installment of this mighty triptych assumes its place in the library, those of us who have been diligently reading and waiting will discover ourselves to be marginally better people, or at least more cheerful and enlightened and tolerant swearers, as a result of what Jonathan Lighter and his cohorts have done for the massive and heretofore unmanageable dirtball of American slang.
(1994)
1 Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Volume 1, A — G), edited by J. E. Lighter.
MIXED
The Northern Pedestal
Esquire
sent out hundred-dollar bills to writers and artists and asked for contributions in return. I found some old pages I had produced in an altered state, cut them down, and added commentary. Except for several corrected typos, the quoted text is reproduced exactly as it was first written.
In the spring of 1982, having received a piece of unwelcome news, the Subject, a male, aged twenty-five, not a habitual drug-user, smoked nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana at his portable typewriter. Subject produced a document that is three single-spaced pages long. It begins:
There is that feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery — haste and pomp cannot coincide.
Six lines later, there are preliminary indications of a disabled rationality:
A logic of the ears, certainty of outer crust. Changing pleasures in misstatements. Maintenance of patternability. Hold on to the camel marts. Feebler lessons in disenchantment, supererogation of the lymphatic spatial asymmetries. Power lessons in discontinuity, retinue of the unfamiliar, flip the reversal tiny efforts of bettering the grimp instinct retractions, flipping up of y behavior patterns, total housal shift unmanageability …
A little further on, Subject accidentally burns his finger:
Odd, dual penetration of pain: veers upward to mind chambers, and through the physical breezes of manual realms. A white veil of pain, but centered, dotlike. Change through further, more rhomboid patterns. Get it round before it fails, or spatial locations nets the prize. It failed. Pods defer to red-shift memory blossoms.