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Review
| Dewdrops, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century, by Rosemarie Ostler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 256 pages. $25.00, hardcover.
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| Rosemarie Ostler's Dewdrops, Waldos, and Slackers, a compendium of vanishing twentieth-century American vocabulary, offers readers a valuable (and entertaining) selection of language "that still resonates with its time." (ix) The book is segmented into ten chapters, each corresponding to a particular decade and featuring a short introduction followed by Ostler's attempts to define the most fascinating words of that era. She argues that new words arise, among other reasons, to meet the challenge of communicating technological advancement, the miseries of combat, newsworthy events, flash-in-the-pan fads, and the lifeways of subcultural "closed groups" (a designation encompassing individuals as diverse as hoboes, immigrants, and computer geeks) that occasionally spill over into mainstream discourse. Consequently, the frenetic modernization and expanding global reach of twentieth-century America engendered a profusion of novel terms and expressions. |
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Perhaps the most fascinating sections of the book are the brief etymological investigations Ostler undertakes into celebrated terms and phrases such as jazz, ballyhoo, juke, jitterbug, punk, dude, and "Kilroy was here." Many readers may be surprised to discover that the word "dude" did not originate in the 1980's San Fernando Valley or the nineteenth-century American West but in eighth-century Northern England, where its antecedent, duddes, referred to 'male clothing.' (183) Ostler's efforts to uncover the origins of "Kilroy was here" are complemented by a humorous anecdote regarding its pervasiveness. She reports that this ubiquitous, graffiti-scrawled phrase (inevitably accompanied by "a big-eyed, bulbous-nosed cartoon character") was so widespread during the Second World War that Soviet Premier Josef Stalin demanded to know, upon emerging from at private outhouse at Potsdam, "Who is Kilroy?" (78) |
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Instructors may find Dewdrops, Waldos, and Slackersa useful supplemental teaching resource. Social Studies or English instructors could usefully employ this text in their efforts to evoke for students the unique mentalite of a particular period in American history. For example, vocabulary included in the second chapter, "Flappers and Flaming Youth," would undoubtedly enrich 11th-graders' encounter with Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Furthermore, a comparative study of specific lexical categories across time can highlight for students how language both expresses and constructs lived experience. The jargon appearing among American soldiers in Vietnam during the 1960's, for instance, reflects a measure of disillusionment with their cause. "Terms like fragging, friendly fire, sorry about that, and winning hearts and minds display a cynicism not found in earlier war slang," writes Ostler. |
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My only caveat regarding the richly evocative vocabulary included in this text concerns Ostler's claim that the terms she has collected represent "words that most Americans would have recognized, if not actually used." (xi) The final two chapters covering the 1980's and 90's (the era of my youth and young adulthood) contained a great number of words with which I was completely unfamiliar and I was left wondering how representative the vocabulary collected in earlier chapters can claim to be. A more thorough consideration of the regional, socio-economic, and racial delimiters for each individual term, or group of terms, might more faithfully have reflected the milieu in which they were actually experienced. |
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| University of California, Irvine |
Matthew Mooney |
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