Author: Brian J. Noggle

While researching for my last book review, a non-fiction book, I discovered some Amazon retailers were selling (I mean, trying to sell) the fiction book I was reading in tandem with the nonfiction book I reviewed for outlandish sums of money. This fact piqued my interest in the fiction book; also, I discovered it was the beginning of a series. So I paid more attention to it and chewed my way through the first couple of chapters.

Of course, the research reminded me of the subtitle and genre, so I could grasp it’s a mystery in space. A Galactic detective, the series character Claudine St. Cyr, is guarding a planetary monarch from assassins, when suddenly the ship’s in danger of going nova and then the captain and subsequent acting captains start dropping of hearts that are inverted en media chest.

Once I got through those first few chapters, I started recognizing that rabbits were going to come out of hats, caps, sweaters, suit jackets, and many other items of apparel, and a whole pantheon of deus ex maquinas were at work here. Understanding this, I could more easily read the book. It wasn’t as though I missed some information, it’s that it just wasn’t there before it was relevant. Subtle things, like psychokinesis would make a good a murder weapon.

But it’s a quick read, and a junk read, and an interesting time capsule of the female protagonist written by a male author in 1969. Claudine St. Cyr is beautiful, intelligent, dutiful, and somehow every named male character in this book wants to marry her, and most of the major characters propose marriage to her in the 170 pages. But she remains chaste, although tempted to kiss on several occasions. A sixties male character in this situation, say an interstellar Mike Hammer, would have Kirked every carbon-based female (or nongendered) life form, would have shot one or more of them later, and would have set the ship to supernova himself to make a point.

So what’s my point? I will read anything, I think.

Book review number 2, friends, and this one’s another nonfiction title since the only junk fiction I have currently is Deathstar Voyage, a late 1960s piece of science fiction that has nothing to do with Star Wars. So, while hiding from the unattractive storyline in that piece of sci-fi, I read Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang by Tom Dalzell.

Personally, I like a bit of linguistics and loving Norma Loquendi every once in a while. So I delved into this piece, which I picked up in June at Powell’s in Chicago (which explains why the link above goes to Powell’s and not Amazon). Its chapters reflect decades from the 1920s to the 1990s, with some decades (1950s, 1960s) split to reflect different subcultures within those decades, and others (1970s-1980s) lumped into a single chapter. Each chapter begins with a short essay thing that captures the spirit of the times/subculture. After that, you’re treated to a list of words, like a glossary, and a couple of sidebars that collect synonyms for common concepts like “good,” “girlfriend/boyfriend,” “greeting,” and the like. At the end of each chapter, the author provides little article things that evaluate certain archetypal words from the period and trace their lineage. Good structure.

However, it’s obvious that the author slapped together this quick-read, coffee-table-linguistics book. The fact that glossary entries replicate themselves, unself-consciously, from chapter to chapter, as though “gasper” were a new term for a cigarette in the 1940s, when the preceding chapter called it the lingo of the soda jerk.

It was only when I got to the 1980s, my youth, that I realized all was not well. In the chapter that lumps the 1980s along with the 1970s, I spotted several errors:

• “animal” (p 168) attributed to the movie Animal House (1978) when The Muppet Show debuted, and popularized, the term earlier;
• “waldo,” (p 184) defined as “Out of it, as in ‘That new kid in Biology class is totally waldo–clueless to the max.’ Derived from the popular Where’s Waldo picture books of the 1980s….” Pardon me, sir, but Where’s Waldo seems to stem from 1987 whereas I distinctly remember the perjorative term applied to me in 1985 by the punks in middle school. Oh, and Waldo was a character in the video for “Hot for Teacher” from the Van Halen album 1984, which came out strangely enough in 1984;
• “Hasta” explained in a sidebar on p 185 as “from the Spanish ‘hasta luego’ or ‘hasta la vista,’ popularized by the movie The Terminator….” Um, no, “Hasta la vista, baby,” was from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991);
• Misspelling of Eddie Murphy’s name as Eddy Murphy (p 195)

And these represent a sample of the incongruities and typographical mistakes I found in that single chapter.

Suddenly, the author’s research (regurgitation of others’ research+some faulty memories, perhaps) is at odds with known facts and my own memory. Suddenly, I couldn’t trust the author for the era I knew, which means I probably can’t trust him for the eras I don’t. Crap! This book was a waste of time. Sloppy research, fanciful assertions, and typographical errors are intolerable when they directly impact the veracity of the subject matter, which is the usage and spelling of words themselves.

Still, the book might illustrate how words never leave vogue, assuming that some of the words and phrases ascribed to the 1920s were really used then. Based on the fluid, evolutionary nature of slang, I don’t think any one of us would be completely out of touch if we stepped through a time-warp into a previous era, or vice versa.