Category: Book Report

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.

Since I read a lot and nothing good seems to come of it, I’ve decided to do a bit of brief book reviewing for you, my five Internet readers. I shall incorporate some puppetry for the sixth person who cannot read but logs in for the soothing blue tones.

I have just completed We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism by Clarence E. Walker, a professor at University of California at Davis. It’s a highly academic book, as the 31 pages (out of 164) are end notes, and it’s split into only two chapters: “If Everybody was King, Who Built the Pyramids: Afrocentrism and Black American History” (83 pages) and “‘All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man’ or ‘Not All Knowledge Is Power'” (50 pages). Personally, this limitation (only two chapters) rather makes it difficult to read, since the organization of the material in the macrochapters is not readily apparent (by the subdivision).

Instead, we have super-sized chapters ill-suited for consumption by a McDonald’s audience. The first chapter, “If Everybody was King, Who Built the Pyramids: Afrocentrism and Black American History”, is the pure science of the book. Walker examines certain tenets of Afrocentric thought, such as Egypt (Kemet) as the primary source for most intellectual thought in the ancient world (which the white men of Greece and Rome ripped off) and that Egypt was even a “black” culture. Instead, Walker identifies Afrocentrism as a therapeutic movement that bears little relationship to actual history. Walker also explores how black African-Americans (not redundant) in the United States diverged from Africans by the nature of their passage to this hemisphere and their bondage.

I didn’t trace the quotes nor research from his endnotes, so I cannot comment on the thoughts and arguments to which he is responding, but his historical points and interpretation make sense in themselves.

However, when we get to “‘All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man’ or ‘Not All Knowledge Is Power'”, Walker fails to signal for the left turn he makes. Just because Afrocentrism is wrong doesn’t mean that affirmative action should be eliminated, I think he means. He begins the second paragraph of the second chapter (page 85, remember):

A rightward drift in American politics is moving the country toward what I call “free market racism,” the state of American race relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the ideology of lassez-faire reigned supreme in the realm of economics and race on the national level.

There he lost me. Not in a violent explosion of disbelief, during which I fling the book against the wall and/or stomp on it (this wasn’t Stupid White Men, after all, and it is not a paperback). But by coining a term “free market racism,” Walker provides the good citizens of Oceania academia with a twist of logic.

Racism and affirmative action, the practice this book defends, represent a statist intrusion into thought and practice in one form or another. Free market, on the other hand, represents a rational system of commerce wherein the best value wins. In a free market of ideas, individual performance should prove a better value than racism or affirmative action. Hence, “free market racism” is a paradox, a contradiction, and a big fat hanging straw man that Walker cracks with a full swing.

I was greatly disappointed with the practical application of repudiating Afrocentrism. Quit following a foolish, bankrupt, therapeutic ideology and start supporting affirmative action. Well, the professor does teach at the University of California at Davis. What did I expect?