The Waterbury Democrat., 1932-09-30

now we merely point out that it's a wow. In prepetting days the bud would say, Now stop!' But, to-day the baby or weenie tells papa, or the butter and egg man, or her sugar daddy, the same sad story with, "Is that Nice?'"' It seems but yesterday that when we were short of some vocal ejacula- ton, we just yelled And howl" particularly when somebody else "shot off his mouth with phrase or sentence that did not leave anyone cold. We all know what putting on a paddock" is. or ''using a cold deck," or doing Q trick" or crashing a racket" And Henry l.. Mencken certainly wasn't far wrong when he said that Slang Is the source from which the energies of decaying speech are constantly refreshed.
 ''In the good old days of the man with "the big stick" the muck raker earned what he was raking for, and was lucky to dodge the team-roller: The gangsters still "come across" but some make so much fuss about it that they are warned by their friends, the cops, the bulls, or whatever else you may please to call them, to come clean. The drugstore cowboy of to-day is very different man from his predecessor but the dumbbell does not seem to be any more noisy than in the days of old. The one thing that puzzles me is what has be- come of all our cake-eaters. lounge lizards, and the rest of the gang? Have they followed the alligator's ankles, the bees knees, the cats meow. the snakes hips, the cheap skate and the nickle-nurser? One thing we may all be very thank full for and that is that the flapper has disappeared. and taken her flapperology with her. English may still be the berries with the mon- ocle boys and stiff fronts, but to the gang that thinks, which is made up of regular guys, it's just cuticura, goose flesh. or some other eruption of the skin!
 "Did slang come over with the Mayflower? Well, who knows? Perhaps it did, for after all, isn't there a bit of it in Priscilla's "Why don't you speak for yourself. John?" Anyway, slang has been with us since the days of "Yan- kee Doodle" and the macaroni feather that he wore, and you know, the Macaronis were the Ma arylanders in the Revolutionary war.
 'Lest we forget, let me say right here that the slang that is picked up by the writers of vaudeville acts or burlesque shows consists of wise- cracks culled from newspapers or cribbed from some big-boy who has been pumped full of joy-gas while making whoopee, as that old sport, Walt Winchell might put 1t. Then 1t is shot across the footlights and all the bozos of the under world buzz around the dance halls, shooting off the stuff as their own.
 Slang and the saxophone are kin, for they both serve as means of expressing every mood-free or tense-of the human heart. To one race it is the "paprika"; to an- other the pap; to third the ginger" and to a fourth the "ta- basco" of expression. Slang is the whip with which we "whoop up" the "jade" It is also caused by q spontaneous combustion of the emotions, a bursting of the bonds of restriction that conventional lie has imposed.
 Irresponsible word- coinage con- tinues to flourish under the mis- taken notion that there are not enough words in the language to express the thoughts which ono wishes to convey. Times have changed, and the change has af- fected words, so that they are not always to be taken at their face values.
 "And now to give you something by which you can remember this occasion. The shortest word In the English language is l; the longest ---do not ask me what it means. for did not coin it-is un.hyper-
 symetrico-anti- pare -ielle pi ped. lcaiisation -ai- Q .grap aphicallN This term was submitted by pavif MaN'say. of tho Police station at T.ochmaddy, North List. Scotland. It is q freak term in the language. known Co Scottish mathomaticisns but unrecorded in the dictionaries"