Archive: Getting New York slang like a 'hipster'

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/10/hipsters-slang-new-york

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If a biscuit is taken on as a canary her voice may eventually turn up on another biscuit. All this means is - according to a lexicon of Broadway slang published in the “New York Times Magazine” - that if a girl is engaged as a singer she may make a gramophone record.

To judge from this collection Broadway slang, like other kinds of American small talk, is as lively and pungent as ever. It has a fine Elizabethan relish for the concrete image. A telephone call is a “blast”; people who get excited “bounce”; “a guy who knows his way around” is a “hipster”.

Some words soar above mere description into a realm of compressed poetic comment. Thus a “flack,” or publicity agent, seems to be an inspired compound of “hack” and “flap”; and “grunt,” for the bill at a restaurant or night club, is a psychological treasure-trove for which there is no doubt a long Greek name in the grammars.

Some words have about them a suggestion of nostalgia for things dead and gone. “To potchky” (“to fool around with”) speaks volumes of Slav aimlessness even though its birthplace is Fifty-second Street. “The Man,” for “the Government” (also known as “Uncle Sugar”), sounds like a protest against the soulless bureaucratic machine and a last attempt to invest it with human feeling.

As for the word for a five-dollar bill, it is “a pound” - “a term,” we are told, “unaffected by the devaluation of the British currency.” What clearer proof could one ask for that however twisted his tail and however depreciated his legal tender there is life in the old British lion yet?