An intriguing romp for word and trivia mavens.
The languages of the Jewish and black ghettos have enriched the wider American vernacular, according to this pop-linguistics book.
Foster (Ribbin’ Jivin’ and Playin’ the Dozens, 2012, etc.), an emeritus professor of education at the State University of New York at Buffalo, explores the mainstream success of two minority verbal cultures. After a fun but pretty hard vocabulary test—“NOSH is to FRESS as NEBBISH is to: a) shtchav b) shnuk c) shmatte d) baleboss”—the work’s centerpiece is a lengthy glossary of selected Yiddish and Jive expressions that have entered common parlance. The former include such essential Yiddish-isms as “kosher,” “bagel,” “tush,” and “chutzpa” along with more exotic concepts like “farklempt”—agitated or depressed—and the arcane anatomical terms “putz,” “schlong,” “schmuck,” and “shvantz,” all of which denote a feature of the male reproductive system. Jive entries include the classics “bling-bling” and “booty call”; the somewhat dated “playin’ the dozens” (meaning competitive yo’-mama insults); locutions that most people don’t know came from the ghetto, like from the “get-go” and “24/7”; and arcane terms for white people, such as “Mr. charlie” and “ofay”—the latter said to come from the pig Latin for “foes.” The author’s entries give dictionary definitions along with extensive usage examples gleaned from books, movies, newspaper articles, ads, and even license plates. “ISHLPKDS” (I SCHLEP KIDS) declares the plate on one mom’s minivan. Additional chapters offer a miscellany of information and historical background. These include sections on gentiles who spoke Yiddish, including novelist Ralph Ellison and actors James Cagney and Michael Caine; “Shabbos goy,” gentiles who performed chores forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath, among them Colin Powell, Harry Truman, and Elvis Presley; the Harlem Renaissance; the “Green Book” guide used by black motorists and travelers to find accommodations in the segregated South under Jim Crow; and “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s famous anti-lynching protest song. It’s all a bit random and jumbled, but Foster offers a tasty feast of curious and intriguing lore for readers (and writers) looking to spice up their language.
An intriguing romp for word and trivia mavens.Pub Date: April 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72746-535-8
Page Count: 178
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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