Eight Kings To Save
Jul 19, 2009 11:25:10 GMT
Post by nic on Jul 19, 2009 11:25:10 GMT
I've been adjusting the dusty contents of my library; but instead of rearranging them as planned, I end up reading them as I go along.
Case in point, the following essay by David Mamet from his book Make-Believe Town. Like him, I have a fondness for "lingo." I grew up in a military household, and spent a lot of time in and around military bases. Picked up a lot of slang over the years; didn't know what most of it meant at the time, but it certainly sounded like something was going on.
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My house was renovated by two German craftsmen. The elder had been in the military, and he spoke to his associate with military cadence and tone.
I learned that eins zwo was, like our American five-niner, a corruption in the aid of clarity. Nine/five and eins/zwei sound potentially too similar when shouted, or spoken through static on the radio.
I enjoyed their work songs, the swing of their "Unraisert und Fern der Heimat," the German military song to the tune of the Russian "Stenka Razin," and obviously inspired by the similarity of the two words raziert/Razin.
Enemy troops, prisoners, learned the song from their captors or captives; and, finding only the one point of similarity, elaborated that point into a composition of their own. They built on the one thing they knew, the similarity of the two words, and the song grew like a neurosis, or a bureaucracy -- it "orgnazied."
There is a secret sign language of railroad switchmen used in shunting cars in the yard, a hand and arm semaphore.
There was the hobo alphabet of chalk marks and the arrangement of stones, "Easy Touch Here," "Mean Man, Nice Woman," "Stay Away."
The New York homicide detectives showed me a code of gestures for Irish, Jewish, African American, Hispanic, man, woman, child.
Knife traders at the Courthouse Square say of a tight fitted pocketknife, it "walks and talks good."
An actor once told me he knew of twenty-seven meanings of the theatrical term "beat."
Thorstein Veblen wrote that any profession with a preponderance
of jargon was make-believe.
But I love and have always jargon, the secret symbols, the fraternal hailing signs, the code of the personals column, the bridge-cheat's recognition signs, the med students mnemonic "On Old Olympus's Towery Top," and the magician's, "Eight Kings Threaten to Save." To study anything else seemed to me like work.
It was and is of the ultimate importance to me that the better poem about the Light Brigade was written by Kipling, that the Buick Riviera's logo derived from that of the Russell Knife Works; thst, on the frontier, Russell Knives bore on their ricasso the stamp "Green River Works," and that, in consequence, to do something "up the Green River" meant to do it completely.
I love the make-believe of the carnival identification "wee-a-zith" -- carny-talk for "with" and meaning, "I am part of the Group"; and the cop's "on the job," the confidence man's "Mister Bates."
The codes mean to me that something of surpassing interest was in progress -- that something was being done up to the Green River, which River, surely as the Cocktail follows the Abby Singer, exists nowhere but on the ricasso, between the hilt and the choil.
Case in point, the following essay by David Mamet from his book Make-Believe Town. Like him, I have a fondness for "lingo." I grew up in a military household, and spent a lot of time in and around military bases. Picked up a lot of slang over the years; didn't know what most of it meant at the time, but it certainly sounded like something was going on.
----------
My house was renovated by two German craftsmen. The elder had been in the military, and he spoke to his associate with military cadence and tone.
I learned that eins zwo was, like our American five-niner, a corruption in the aid of clarity. Nine/five and eins/zwei sound potentially too similar when shouted, or spoken through static on the radio.
I enjoyed their work songs, the swing of their "Unraisert und Fern der Heimat," the German military song to the tune of the Russian "Stenka Razin," and obviously inspired by the similarity of the two words raziert/Razin.
Enemy troops, prisoners, learned the song from their captors or captives; and, finding only the one point of similarity, elaborated that point into a composition of their own. They built on the one thing they knew, the similarity of the two words, and the song grew like a neurosis, or a bureaucracy -- it "orgnazied."
There is a secret sign language of railroad switchmen used in shunting cars in the yard, a hand and arm semaphore.
There was the hobo alphabet of chalk marks and the arrangement of stones, "Easy Touch Here," "Mean Man, Nice Woman," "Stay Away."
The New York homicide detectives showed me a code of gestures for Irish, Jewish, African American, Hispanic, man, woman, child.
Knife traders at the Courthouse Square say of a tight fitted pocketknife, it "walks and talks good."
An actor once told me he knew of twenty-seven meanings of the theatrical term "beat."
Thorstein Veblen wrote that any profession with a preponderance
of jargon was make-believe.
But I love and have always jargon, the secret symbols, the fraternal hailing signs, the code of the personals column, the bridge-cheat's recognition signs, the med students mnemonic "On Old Olympus's Towery Top," and the magician's, "Eight Kings Threaten to Save." To study anything else seemed to me like work.
It was and is of the ultimate importance to me that the better poem about the Light Brigade was written by Kipling, that the Buick Riviera's logo derived from that of the Russell Knife Works; thst, on the frontier, Russell Knives bore on their ricasso the stamp "Green River Works," and that, in consequence, to do something "up the Green River" meant to do it completely.
I love the make-believe of the carnival identification "wee-a-zith" -- carny-talk for "with" and meaning, "I am part of the Group"; and the cop's "on the job," the confidence man's "Mister Bates."
The codes mean to me that something of surpassing interest was in progress -- that something was being done up to the Green River, which River, surely as the Cocktail follows the Abby Singer, exists nowhere but on the ricasso, between the hilt and the choil.
