Most dictionaries supply the gunman definition. The Oxford English Dictionary throws in the Yiddish root and adds the homosexual reference. But only the indefatigable lexicographer J. E. Lighter has told gunsel’s whole story. In his Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Volume 1, A-G (1,006 pages. $50), he gives all the definitions, clearly marks the turn the word took in Huston’s movie and then, for good measure, adds yet another definition: a stupid or contemptible fellow, a creep.
Lighter’s job on gunsel is an impressive piece of etymological excavation and typical of the scholarly thoroughness with which he attacks the 20,000 definitions in this volume. An obsessive slang collector since his teens, the 45-year-old University of Tennessee English teacher has supported those definitions with 90,000 citations from books, comics, movies, magazines, songs and interviews to show how each word has been used over the years. As a result, Lighter’s slang dictionary is by far the most authoritative work of its kind (volumes 2 and 3 will be out in 1996 and 1997). It is also a monument to the inventiveness, the rascality and the utter lack of taste with which Americans have reupholstered their language.
If standard English is language as we get it from the mountaintop - from teachers, professors and assorted word police - slang is language from the bottom up, as it exists at street (and often gutter) level. It obeys few rules, so lexicographers have a hard time defining it except to say what it isn’t. It isn’t cant, argot, jargon or dialect. Lighter calls it an “extensive maverick vocabulary” and tentatively defines it as “an informal, nonstandard, nontechnical vocabulary composed chiefly of novel-sounding synonyms for standard words and phrases,” adding that his definition doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.
More often than not, slang is language with an attitude. It can be as raw as bathtub gin or as current as a tabloid headline, but more than anything else it is the sound of people having fun with words. It is the gangster’s “doxy,” the homeboy’s “dis” and the prisoner’s “Edison Special,” signifying a trip to the electric chair. More than anything, slang is a collective enterprise. With a few exceptions, such as Red Barber’s “catbird seat,” it lacks attribution, and no wonder, since so much of it is sexist, racist or obscene-delete the expletives from Lighter’s dictionary and you could cut it in half. The F word and its variants claim no fewer than 13 pages in Lighter’s dictionary.
Not surprisingly, most slang - derisive, impudent, angry - is created whenever ornery Americans go head to head with institutions. The military in particular is one big slang factory. Lighter lists thousands of entries, and in War Slang (403 pages. Pocket. $25), lexicographer Paul Dickson lists thousands more. Intriguingly, Dickson has organized his dictionary by war, matching each bit of slang to its appropriate conflict. We got shoddy and sideburns from the Civil War, ammo and cockpit from World War I, foxhole and K-ration from World War II, MASH from Korea and Charlie from Vietnam.
The late lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner once noted that slang constitutes about 10 percent of the 10,000 to 20,000 words that the average American knows, but it belongs to the part of his vocabulary he uses the most. Where dictionaries like the OED make us feel like we’re sinners in church, this one makes us feel like we’re back with the homefolks. And while no one would think of denying Lighter’s expertise (the “A” entries began as his Ph.D. thesis), neither would you hesitate to argue with him. Where, you might ask, is the entry for bogeyman, or better yet, boogerman? Where is friendly fire? More subtly, one might question the paradox at the heart of this dictionary: how do you reconcile the apparatus of citations from mostly written sources, valuable as they are, with the fact that slang is essentially a spoken idiom?
But no matter how many bones you might pick with Lighter, none of them seriously diminishes his achievement. Though he stands on the shoulders of slang experts like Flexner, Eric Partridge, Gershon Legman, H. L. Mencken and George Ade, he has outdone them all. Lighter’s dictionary accords the nation’s homemade language the respectful scrutiny it has so long deserved and so rarely enjoyed. Not incidentally, no one has ever created a scholarly work that is more fun to get lost in. Borrowing from the dictionary itself, this volume is the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, the eel’s ankle and the frog’s tonsils.
n. an empty-headed person. Bonnie Raitt, 1982: A lot of my friends thought I had moved to the beach and turned into Gidget. But it’s not like I…became and airhead.
v. 1. to mangle; to defeat utterly; trounce. Also (emphatic) chaw up and spit out. 2. to trick or ridicule. 3. to scold angrily; bawl out.-also contsr. with up. 4. to converse.
n. 1.a. an offensive or dull-witted old person, esp. a man. b. an odd or unusual fellow; blockhead. 2.a. drink of whisky or other liquor. b. an injection of morphine, heroin or a similar drug.
