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Henry Begler's avatar

Great essay, I've ordered the book! Demotic-American from roughly 1930-1960 is one of the best periods for English speech, right up there with Elizabethan England.

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Jonathon GREEN's avatar

That would be v. kind but it wasn't my intention. All my own bks are in boxes at the moment. But there are, as I recall, a few pages. I think the useful thing I had to say was that while DR was often accused of making it up as he went along (as are so many writers who use a good deal of the counter-language) the more I checked it out, the more it was legit. I've taken just over 1000 trms from his books which bears out the Time mag. article of 1934 when they named the then top 10 slangsters and Runyon was right in there alongside his best friend 'Waldo Winchester' (real life gossip writer Walter Winchell), sports journo Ring Lardner, the cartoonist TAD (T.A. Dorgan) and various others.

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