INTRODUCTION
to the First Edition

'Where in English we are concerned with communicating exactly what we want to convey and nothing else, the hipster is satisfied if what he says manages to include what he means. Imagine the difference between shooting at a dime from twenty paces with a .22 rifle, and with a 40-gauge shotgun, and you will have a rough approximation of the difference between English and Hip.'
FROM THE ALBUM HOW TO SPEAK HIP, DEL CLOSE AND JOHN BRENT, 1959

Back in the old days before the dawn of colour TV, genuine hepcats like Cab Calloway and Lavada Durst published dictionaries of hipster slang that took a narrower definition than the present volume and, not surprisingly, wound up with booklets that ran for about twelve pages, although the prize in this department must go to Babs Gonzales, whose Boptionary contains a whole fifty-three phrases spread out over two small, but immaculately cool pages.

What you have here is something more inclusive, drawing on phrases and words from pulp novels, classic noir and exploitation films, blues, country and rock’n’roll lyrics and other related sources. Millions of people down through the years have happily read Raymond Chandler’s novels without necessarily knowing what a roscoe might be, and generations of Louis Armstrong fans have enjoyed listening to Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, only occasionally wondering why the great man felt the need to walk around apparently clutching an item of alfresco cooking equipment. If you attempt to use more than a few of these phrases in normal conversation, you’ll most likely be shunned by ordinary, decent people or taken away for special tests at a secure establishment in the country somewhere. Nevertheless, even though many of the words in this dictionary may be the product of sick-minded individuals inventing hip phrases to fill out the dialogue in numerous low-budget teen films and crime stories, they have a life of their own and most of them refuse to lie down and play dead.

Half the people trying to write the ‘Great American Novel’ fifty years ago seemed to think that the best way to do that was to employ an over-educated style which would have made Marcel Proust look like someone with a limited vocabulary, whereas no-nonsense pulp products like Hot Dames On Cold Slabs by Michael Storme or Two Timing Tart by John Davidson had an entirely different audience in mind. Although the works of great writers like Chandler and Hammett are rich in authentic slang, it’s also true that some of the tackiest or most obscure pulp hacks provide the best and most individual examples of hip as it should be spoken. The blues and rockabilly performers of the 1950s were often making records for small labels with only a very limited, local audience, so they could get away with using phrases which might mean something to a farming community in Texas but be completely incomprehensible in New York, such as Hank Stanford’s version of She’s A Hum Dum Dinger (From Dingersville) which contains the immortal line 'She’s long, she’s tall, she’s a handsome queen / She’s got ways like a mowing machine'.

Many of the books and much of the music quoted here which are now hailed as classics were sneered at or marginalised as throwaway entertainment for the lower orders, and were often produced by people who didn’t know if their career was going to last out the week. The general law that seems to have applied in such cases appears to be that if you worked for peanuts, starved most of the time and died in almost total obscurity, you are then free to be hailed as a genius. When the great Jim Thompson died in 1977 none of his books were in print in the USA. Nelson Algren, Chicago’s finest, was in a pretty much similar position a few years later at the time of his own death, and, by pulp standards, they were two of the howling great success stories. Hell, even Hollywood came calling on relatively regular intervals. Both writers have now been the subject of extensive reissue programmes, but, on balance, they probably don’t care much one way or the other these days.

In general, the language contained here originated either with jazz musicians or gangsters in the early part of the 20th century. There’s an enormous amount of crossover between these basic reference points, which isn’t surprising, since musicians frequently played in venues run by mobsters, and the tough guys with the machine guns were often fans of the music. The well-known tale of Frank Sinatra arriving in Cuba to visit Lucky Luciano and the heads of all the US mafia families, allegedly carrying a suitcase containing a million green pictures of George Washington, is just one example. Both of these two sections of the community enjoyed going to the movies, so once Hollywood started putting out crime films featuring people like Cagney and Bogart, the language was passed around even more, with many real-life hoods trying to dress and behave like George Raft.

It probably won’t escape the notice of the more attentive reader that many of these slang phrases concern drink, drugs, sex and violent crime. Jazz music emerged from the Storyville district of New Orleans, a red light area so wide open that the government sent in the troops in 1917 to close the whole place down, and a life spent hanging around in whorehouses and bargain-basement gambling joints is hardly likely to produce a group of people given to speaking like characters from a Jane Austen novel. Attitudes to women, in particular, sometimes make the average caveman look like a bleeding-heart liberal, but, on the other hand, some of the female characters who show up in film noir and hardboiled crime fiction are as sharp as a razor and nobody’s fool. Veronica Lake, Gene Tierney, Lauren Bacall and any number of Jim Thompson characters could talk back with the best of them and eat most men for breakfast. Sure, attitudes have changed a lot since those days, but that’s true across all sections of society and popular culture – the casual racism of children’s comics back in the 1940s is breathtaking to modern sensibilities.

The overall tone of hipster slang is a kind of deadpan cynicism – not entirely unexpected from a section of society that often spent much of its time trying to avoid the law and scrape the rent money together. The dark tone and worldview of film noir is all the more understandable when one considers that a great many of the people responsible for the genre had escaped from Europe one step ahead of Uncle Adolf and his playmates. Flouting some aspects of the law didn’t seem particularly strange back in the twenties, once the stern moralists with the big sticks had succeeded in having booze outlawed – a particularly smart move which drove nearly the whole adult population into some sort of contact with organised crime in their search for dishonest refreshment.

The earliest examples of slang given here are from around the turn of the last century, and the most recent are taken from the middle years of the 1960s, which was roughly the time when the people who thought they were cool stopped wearing suits, gave up holding onto each other when dancing, and both sexes started a competition to see who could have the longest hair. All cut-off points are pretty arbitrary, but as a handy frame of reference, you could say that Sinatra’s Rat Pack in Las Vegas in the early sixties represents the end of the hipster era as defined by this book. By 1968, four lovable moptops from Liverpool had decided that what rock’n’roll really, really needed was a serious injection of brass band music and string quartets, and a hippie fan of theirs named Charles Manson out in California was turning on his family to the White Album: ‘Are you hep to what the Beatles are saying? Helter Skelter is coming down. The Beatles are telling it like it is.’ Cab Calloway would have understood the use of the word ‘hep’ in that last sentence, but he sure wouldn’t have been likely to have gone up to any stray flower children on the street in Haight-Ashbury and asked them for the address of their tailor.

For the most part, though, it really doesn’t matter very much whether you think Ocean’s Eleven is the name of a football team, or that The Grifters were the vocal group who recorded Save The Last Dance For Me. While it’s probably true that the language used in films such as High School Confidential bears only a slight relation to that way that drug-crazed gang members actually spoke, it still has something of the authentic flavour of those times. Mostly, though, it’s just there to be enjoyed, and it’s worth it just to imagine hordes of impressionable teenage filmgoers back in 1958 attempting to impress their dates with lines like 'Give me an introduction to this snake and I’ll hitch up the reindeers for you.' Anyhow, I’d better hop in my kemp and take off for the casbah.

Plant ya now, dig ya later,

MAX DÉCHARNÉ
Berlin, May 2000