Boo-yah: “Using complex language in everyday life, meanwhile, might make your friend group suspect you of being a cop, in other words a professor, if not a fairy.” See also: Greater Boston public school, c 1982
"Saying anything straight was proof you were a flatfoot"--reading the Big Con with your introduction ended up bringing a chill of recognition to my spine when I dove back into Naked Lunch, alive now to the language from the everyday underworld of men making designs on each other. Burroughs had been an old friend of my fathers so it felt weirdly close and a century distant. They had drunk at the same bar as Dalton Trumbo and reminisced about the jaw-dropping cynicism of his arresting officer. Burroughs used the language of con men to expose the dominating 'routines' of straight medicine and psychiatry (the very name for a doctor-- "Fingers" Schaefer the Lobotomy Kid--is like one of those works of philosophy with its whole key argument in the title) even as his own sense of brutalizing people, I think mostly women, chilled me in a different way. That language did so much it was scary.
Go on you good thing.
Hooray! Here we go. Delightful to dip into Hawks-speak in the first installment…
Very enjoyable and illuminating.
this is wonderful!
Boo-yah: “Using complex language in everyday life, meanwhile, might make your friend group suspect you of being a cop, in other words a professor, if not a fairy.” See also: Greater Boston public school, c 1982
an exhilarating ride, Lucy …. bravo!
"Saying anything straight was proof you were a flatfoot"--reading the Big Con with your introduction ended up bringing a chill of recognition to my spine when I dove back into Naked Lunch, alive now to the language from the everyday underworld of men making designs on each other. Burroughs had been an old friend of my fathers so it felt weirdly close and a century distant. They had drunk at the same bar as Dalton Trumbo and reminisced about the jaw-dropping cynicism of his arresting officer. Burroughs used the language of con men to expose the dominating 'routines' of straight medicine and psychiatry (the very name for a doctor-- "Fingers" Schaefer the Lobotomy Kid--is like one of those works of philosophy with its whole key argument in the title) even as his own sense of brutalizing people, I think mostly women, chilled me in a different way. That language did so much it was scary.
It's not just Anglo-Saxon v Latin with food words, it's poor v rich. The poor farmed them and the rich ate them.
Wonderful! Those ‘silent’ letters we all love to hate that create a phonetic minefield for non- native speakers and give English its enduring appeal!
Good lord, the writing here is out of this world.