Essentials of Medical Language Book

Dynamite and it rocks

Okay all you ignorami out there, listen up. So you've had a bad hair day and the axis of evil is on your case. You've been there and done that big time. You've kicked Major Buttski, and whatever, and it only hurts when you laugh (your foot, that is). You've seen men and women behaving badly and you've been behind the eight ball. Despair not. Get a life not a library card because the real deal lingo is going down in your part of town--well, in this book.

Descriptive grammarians unite! Push those old fuddy-duddies out the door. This voluptuous volume of edible prose is da bomb! It is finger lickin good to linguists and lexicographers and cultural anthropologists on the make. And all you old stuffy school marms and proscriptive grammarian types, "Don't even THINK about telling me I don't THINK so." (Actually a title of one of the chapters in this oh so delectable wordsmith's book of manna from heaven.)

All right, enough.

When as an undergraduate I first heard Bob Dylan--well, when I first parsed his lyrics--it occurred to me that this man sings in cliches! (I'm resisting a "duh" here.) This is NOT poetry was what my English major mind thought. And then when I was one and twenty (I was so much older then) it occurred to me that Dylan was using not words themselves to make up his poetic lines, but groups or phrases of words, of cliches, the words we all use and hear day in and day out, and THAT was the basis of his lyrical poetry.

Wow, talk about your enlightenments! Anyway, what culture critic and word spinner deluxe Leslie Savan has done in this book is something akin to that. She has taken the phrases of pop language (as she calls it) and turned an examination of those phrases into a lexicographer's search for the derivation of terms. As all lovers of dictionaries know, you can learn a lot about history, sociology, psychology and such by just studying the dictionary. Well, Savan has learned a lot about the pop culture from studying its expressions. There is a psychology behind "yo, dude!"; there is a sociology contained in "like, you know, make my day"; there is a biology behind the f-word; there is some economics in "do the math"; and some history in "plausible deniability."

One of the reasons I am able to grab hold of these pop phrases so easily is that Savan has provided an index that, well, lists them (or most of them) by page number. Because Savan is an expert on advertising and the media, having written a column on the same for The Village Voice for many years, she just naturally has bouncing around in her head all matter of cliches and pop sounds from the powerful mavens of media who try to tell us what to buy, how to dress and what to think.

But she doesn't stop there. One of the chapters is on "digital talk," the words and phrases, "initialisms" and acronyms from emails and emessaging, from computerland and the Web, like "fresh, squeezed words," e.g., IMHO, LOTFLMAO, OMG, wtf? (caps optional or used WHEN SHOUTING!), the now ancient and soon to be forgotten WYSIWYG, and the fifteen minutes of fame tag, J. Lo.

Another chapter is on black pop that becomes white pop that becomes "said all over"--Ebonics and hip hop and whassup with that--you know what I'm saying? There are footnotes at the end of the book and a bibliography that includes people like Steven Pinker, Desmond Morris and Mark Twain, but not George Orwell. How he would have loved this book! Ditto for H. L. Mencken and Ambrose Bierce.

Some reviewers have tried to trivialize Savan's work, but look at it this way: her publisher is Alfred A. Knopf and you know they are as high brow and deadly serious as publishers can get.

Bottom line: this is an important work on American culture and language not to be missed, and a lot of fun to read.

--Dennis Littrell, author of the sensational mystery novel, "Teddy and Teri"