Customer Reviews

Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever

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For years I was a fan of Savan's ad column in the Village Voice. She had a startling way of zeroing in on culture through the prism of advertisements: she was shrewd, funny, wonderfully insightful. She could draw my attention to cultural foibles I'd never recognized before, but that then became unmistakable. Now here she is in this book, all those things again, and more. I love that this time, she's appraising culture through pop language. What better way to go???? While I was reading this, I kept finding myself thinking, Yes! Exactly! Savan has vision, voice and heart. This is a really good book.

"Yessss!" I say pumping my fist jaggedly into the air. Leslie Savan is one of our smartest critics and her new book crackles with the predictable dosage of both biting wit and sharp insight. It's a merciless tear-down of, um like, the way we talk nowadays. And if you think the way we talk doesn't directly influence the WAY we think, or don't think, then you're just plain wrong. During the 1990's, Savan's columns in the Village Voice were a must-read. Never saw anything like them before nor since. And while you're waiting to see a new series from her, take a read of Slam Dunks and hope to hell you're not reading about yourself! Either way, you're gonna love ot.

Slam Dunks and No-Brainers helps clean your brain of the garbage that's been collecting through decades of misuse and abuse. Read it before you watch any more TV or pick up a new magazine. A terrific read -- highly recommended.

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.

Savan's new book is unexpectedly hilarious, while it explores the cultural origins of many current catch-phrases and popular expressions. I say "unexpected" because of expectations created by the sour response of NY Times reviewer P.J. O'Rourke, who seemed more upset by Savan's swipes at the Bush Administration than by her keen analysis of contemporary language. Frankly, given Rumsfeld's response to the Iraqi insurgency ("stuff happens"), the political appropriation of popular slang seems like fair game for criticism. And anyone who enjoys the wordplay on shows from "The Simpsons" to "Seinfeld" won't be able to put this book down. Give it to your favorite Republicans for Christmas - and dare them not to laugh!

Slam Dunks and No-Brainers is smart, funny and, in a world where so many of us just want to hear our "talking points" echoed back to us, original. This book isn't like other books about language. It's not a glossary, and it's not trying to tell you how to talk or how not to talk. Instead it looks at how at how certain popular phrases--"bring it on!" "who's your daddy?" "interactive," "community," even "guys" and "hey"--operate as a subtle form of advertising. DIck Cheney does it, Bush does it, the media do it, little kids do. We all do it, Savan says cheerfully--so let's look at it, open our brains, and think about what it means. But if you like ideas presented in black-or-white, then you might miss what this book's about.

If the author spent a few hours deciding on a clear purpose for this book she might have had something more readable. As it is, this reads as if she has diarrhea of the word processor and is in automatic (and unthinking) mode. She starts out the book with complaints about cliches but changes her mind when she admits that she uses them. Then she switiches to a tirade against buzz phrases, isn't really sure what they are, comes up with a new term - pop words -gives a definition that is as clear as mud, starts complaining again about cliches, and just blathers on and on. The book ends up being nothing but a sarcastic complaint against any words or phrases that get on HER nerves - and she seems easily irritated and hypersensitive. Well, if I was writing a book, my complaint would be about authors who have no clear focus and who think that the rest of us are interested in their pet peeves. If you are a great wit, you can get away with that. If not, you come off as a prematurely testy codger bellyaching about those uneducated mobs out there who don't know how to coin a new simile at the drop of a hat. Tedious, unfunny stuff. Don't waste your time.

Not only did I delight audibly in Ms Savan's original thinking and many colorful stories, so did my 13-yr-old son! He actually picked up and read this book which he found on my desk by accident. He thought it was "very interesting." Who but a 13-year-old would understand better the pollution and dumbing down of today's popular language? Leslie Savan is one-of-a-kind and I'm happy to have discovered her again after her years writing at the Voice. She is at her absolute best in this clever, highly entertaining, and thought-provoking book. You go girl!!

I wanted to like this book more than I did, but I just found a lot of it to be, like, lame! Savan has some good points but she repeats herself so much, drowning every sentence in 'pop words' that offset other 'pop words' reminding her of even more 'pop words', that large parts of the book are a convoluted mess!
Much of the ground has been covered elsewhere, in greater detail, and in less headache-inducing style!
I did find some interesting nuggets, but had to skim through a lot of tedious material to get there. Fans of language should check it out if they're curious. People who can do without socio-political commentary should skip it.

If language is our window on the world, Savan's book is an economy size bottle of Windex. With wit and style, and oh-so-much substance, Savan illuminates the secret world of slang: cool, comforting and connecting, on the one hand, and so easily bent toward cynical ends on the other. In reading her analysis of "whatever" in its various incarnations, I was transported back to a deliciously absurd conversation in which an old boss sat across her desk and deconstructed my inflection to determine if I was engaging in insubordination or just Zenlike detachment. (T'was the latter, and I kept my job.) As in her gone but not forgotten Village Voice column, Savan shows an uncanny ability to get to the heart of the matter: they who control the debate control the world. So, dude, I have to say that, like, buying this book is such a no-brainer. Or not.
A fun, thought provoking read. Highly recommended.