The Word on the Streets by Hefner Brooks E.;

Author:Hefner, Brooks E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

The “American language” of Hammett’s fiction, Chandler writes (channeling Mencken), “only looks like speech,” but is in fact a language that can communicate more than one realizes. In much the same way Yezierska and Jolas characterized immigrant language, Hammett’s use of the vernacular transforms the language of the streets into something that “could say almost anything.”

As with Jolas’s publication of “Slanguage: 1929” in transition, the hard-boiled language of Hammett and others also grew out of a broader interest in the lexicographical interest in varieties of American vernacular language. While glossaries of criminal argot have a long history in the study of slang (they are among the first specialized dictionaries of slang), hard-boiled writing of the 1920s foregrounded this language as a particularly modern form of linguistic experimentation.32 As detective fiction changed, the pulp magazines that were publishing the genre also saw the value of slang lexicography. Flynn’s, which would publish Chandler, Hammett, and Carroll John Daly under its later title Detective Fiction Weekly, serialized Henry Leverage’s “Dictionary of the Underworld” in 1925, noting in some installments that “here is another chunk of the vocabulary Flynn’s is publishing weekly, both as a help to its readers in reading some of its underworld stories and as a matter of general interest.”33 The need for a textual apparatus for reading crime stories emphasized the experimental linguistic focus of the hard-boiled style. The first installment presented underworld slang as impenetrable and fluid:

There are dives in New York’s underworld where a language is spoken that the ordinary citizen, listening in, would find impossible to understand. It isn’t English, French, German, or Yiddish; it is a language by itself. . . . Flynn’s intends to present to you in successive issues a dictionary of this argot. We realize we are offering the vocabulary of a fluid, ever-changing tongue. By its very nature it must be incomplete. It will include words common to every-day slang. Every flapper uses some of these words. But they have been included because frequently they convey a different significance in underground channels. Then there are words that none but a crook or hobo would use or understand.34

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