The City in Slang

The City in Slang

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  • Author: Irving Lewis Allen
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0195357760
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 320

The American urban scene, and in particular New York's, has given us a rich cultural legacy of slang words and phrases, a bonanza of popular speech. Hot dog, rush hour, butter-and-egg man, gold digger, shyster, buttinsky, smart aleck, sidewalk superintendent, yellow journalism, breadline, straphanger, tar beach, the Tenderloin, the Great White Way, to do a Brodie--these are just a few of the hundreds of popular words and phrases that were born or took on new meaning in the streets of New York. In The City in Slang, Irving Lewis Allen traces this flowering of popular expressions that accompanied the emergence of the New York metropolis from the early nineteenth century down to the present. This unique account of the cultural and social history of America's greatest city provides in effect a lexicon of popular speech about city life. With many stories Allen shows how this vocabulary arose from city streets, often interplaying with vaudeville, radio, movies, comics, and the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley. Some terms of great pertinence to city people today have unexpectedly old pedigrees. Rush hour was coined by 1890, for instance, and rubberneck dates to the late 1890s and became popular in New York to describe the busloads of tourists who craned their necks to see the tall buildings and the sights of the Bowery and Chinatown. The Big Apple itself (since 1971 the official nickname of New York) appeared in the 1920s, though first in reference to the city's top racetracks and to Broadway bookings as pinnacles of professional endeavor. Allen also tells fascinating stories behind once-popular slang that is no longer in use. Spielers, for example, were the little girls in tenement districts who danced ecstatically on the sidewalks to the music of the hurdy-gurdy men and, when they were old enough, frequented the dance halls of the Lower East Side. Following the trail of these words and phrases into the city's East Side, West Side, and all around the town, from Harlem to Wall Street, and into the haunts of its high and low life, The City in Slang is a fascinating look at the rich cultural heritage of language about city life.


The City in Slang

The City in Slang

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  • Author: Irving Lewis Allen
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Americanisms
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 307


City Slang

City Slang

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  • Author: Søren Ulrik Thomsen
  • Publisher: Gyldendal A/S
  • ISBN: 8702205882
  • Category : Poetry
  • Languages : da
  • Pages : 63

Digte, især om København, men også andre store europæiske byer og deres puls, sanset og bearbejdet af et åbent sind og en vågen krop. City Slang er Søren Ulrik Thomsens første digtsamling. Den udkom oprindeligt 1981 på forlaget Vindrose.


The City in Slang

The City in Slang

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  • Author: Irving L. Allen
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780197709412
  • Category : Americanisms
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0


The Dictionary of City Names in American Slang

The Dictionary of City Names in American Slang

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  • Author: Maciej Widawski
  • Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
  • ISBN: 9783631607671
  • Category : English language
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

This unique dictionary presents popular slang names for North American cities. These expressions are used instead of official names to convey additional information. They are semantically rich and culturally meaningful, telegraphically describing the characteristics of the cities to which they refer, explaining the motivations of their coiners, and revealing the attitudes of their users. The dictionary lists 500 entries, each containing a headword, usage label, standard equivalent, and numerous contextual examples which authenticate their usage. The material comes from a large database of quotations from media, film, literature, and oral sources. A reliable and practical reference, the dictionary will be useful for linguists, educators, students and anyone interested in the subject.


American English

American English

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  • Author: Zoltan Kovecses
  • Publisher: Broadview Press
  • ISBN: 1770484280
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 362

This book is a cultural-historical (rather than purely linguistic) introduction to American English. The first part consists of a general account of variation in American English. It offers concise but comprehensive coverage of such topics as the history of American English; regional, social and ethnic variation; variation in style (including slang); and British and American differences. The second part of the book puts forward an account of how American English has developed into a dominant variety of the English language. It focuses on the ways in which intellectual traditions such as puritanism and republicanism, in shaping the American world view, have also contributed to the distinctiveness of American English.


The city

The city

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  • Author: Frederic Carrel
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 400


The Slang Dictionary

The Slang Dictionary

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  • Author: John Camden Hotten
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 436


Strange Talk

Strange Talk

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  • Author: Gavin Jones
  • Publisher: Univ of California Press
  • ISBN: 9780520921191
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 346

Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect: vernacular varieties of American English entertained mass audiences in "local color" stories, in realist novels, and in poems and plays. But dialect was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of urban life, the ethnic impact of foreign immigration, the black presence in white society, and the female influence on masculine authority. Celebrations of the rustic raciness in American vernacular were undercut by fears that dialect was a force of cultural dissolution with the power to contaminate the dominant language. In this volume, Gavin Jones explores the aesthetic politics of this neglected "cult of the vernacular" in little-known regionalists such as George Washington Cable, in the canonical work of Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, and in the ethnic writing of Abraham Cahan and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He reveals the origins of a trend that deepened in subsequent literature: the use of minority dialect to formulate a political response to racial oppression, and to enrich diverse depictions of a multicultural nation.


Dubliners

Dubliners

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  • Author: James Joyce
  • Publisher: Prestwick House Inc
  • ISBN: 1580491650
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 194

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader understand Joyce's use of textures, dialect, and symbols.Each of the beautifully written short stories in this collection precisely details a brief scene in the life of a resident of Dublin at the turn of the 20th century. Although the characters do not know each other, their experiences unfold along the same streets and often overlap thematically. Their tragedies mirror that of Ireland, a country struggling for political identity and held back, in Joyce's view, by rigid religious ideas and adherence to tradition.Joyce's great skill at dialect offers a sense of the city's complex social structure, while themes of isolation, emotional paralysis, violence, regret, and death run throughout the collection and link all of the stories. Chronologically, too, the stories appear to progress; portrayals of youthful confusion and disillusionment in the opening story, "The Sisters," become the haunting midlife meditations of "The Dead." Like his masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce's Dubliners displays consummate control of nuances, emotions, and images.