Customer Reviews

Slanguage : A Cool, Fresh, Phat, and Shagadelic Guide to All Kinds of Slang

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I do a lot of traveling for work and my wife picked up this book for me as I endlessly wait in airport terminals or somewhere over the un-friendly skies.

I've read it three times already! Each time catching things I missed before. This book is hysterical! As I flip each page, I learn a different phrase or tid-bit of information I never knew before about all sorts of places around the globe. Things you could never know without taking up residence in each region.

Even a seasoned traveler like myself was surprised about how little I knew about places like Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Denver, Columbus, Boston, Nashville, and even Scranton, PA. Places I once only thought of as stopovers between business meetings and my home in Portland, Oregon, I now think of as little worlds of their own, with their own rich traditions and idiosyncrasies. The book even informs you on things you should and should not say in places like Beijing, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Rio and even Nairobi.

But the book also goes into gambling slang, golf slang, truck driver slang, day trader slang, military slang, ER slang, and even teenager slang (which will come in handy when my daughter becomes one next year). This book is a riot!

You won't have to be a world traveler like me to appreciate this book. You just have to be curious about the world around you and enjoy the subtle differences that make all of us interesting, wonderful and special. I don't know how the author documented all this, but kudos. What a fun and educational read! Highly recommend!

I'd been looking for a small(er) book on Slang and this book fit my purpose. It's not "in depth", that is, it doesn't hold much detail. But it does cover basics.

I was born and raised in Binghamton, NY and lived Baltimore, MD for a decade and a half. The entries for both cities (as well as for Washington DC, which any "Baltimoron" has a fair amount of experience with) had "slang" that either I had never heard of or which suggested a pronunciation that would mark anyone attempting to use that term/phrase as a definite outsider. This puts all other local slang in question.

It also provides incorrect names for both the "O's" and the "Skins" stadiums. Perhaps the FedEx stadium was too recent of a change when the book was published, but by 2000 the "O's" had been playing at Camden Yards (aka "The Yard") for nearly a decade (and Memorial Stadium was both closed and slated for demolition by the time this book was published).

While the idea is great, the factual innaccuracies, combined with the fact that the book has literally fallen to pieces with very little use, will keep me from ordering a new copy of this book for the library I work at.

I have an old yellow pamphlet titled "How to Speak Pittsburghese." And I remember a humorous book titled "If I Tell You a Hen Dips Snuff," which provided piquant derivations for hundreds of mentally twisted but oddly appropriate expressions used by the anything-but-plain-spoken human population that ranches, fishes, crochets, hunts and haunts East Texas. I've been to parts of rural Colorado and California where I could barely understand what they call English--not that there's anything wrong with that. "American" is not now a single unified language, and it probably never has been.

There have been more scholarly compilations of regional American usage mixed into larger-scope works or published as comparative examinations of cultural contrasts. In Slanguage, Mike Ellis's unique tool for rounding up and taming the slang highlights of over 200 different regions, eras, and genres, in a convenient and accessible way, is to break the expressions into little phonetic pieces. The divide-and-conquer result is light, fun, and useful to boot. Salespeople, for instance, could both enjoy this book, and use it to gain some insight into the jargon of the different regions they travel to, and speak to on the telephone.

Town Andrews, Author of The Art of Hanging

I loved this book!!! If you have any interest in the English language, it's a must buy... It's a great gift if you're a traveler, and u want to fit in with the locals..

Very humorous. But it's only funny because it's so totally innacurate (I'm speaking, specifically, about the so called slang for San Francisco)... I don't know of any one who uses these terms, like 'The Mish' for The Mission. To do so while strolling Valencia would surely ID you as a tourist (or worse, an easy mark) in less time than it would take three Marines to dates on Capp Street.