OSCAR (NOT THE GROUCH) takes the stage Sunday night for the 86th Academy Awards. Here’s another life-time achievement award for you, my salute to the unsung hero of the silver screen, the movie extra, and a primer on how to talk like one. EXTRAS. Bit players, bits, dinkies, lot hoppers, mob, types. Spec. atmosphere (extras…
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MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL throws out its first pitch of the 2014 season on Saturday in the series opener between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Los Angeles Dodgers. I welcome it. But I also have to admit that, in a era when climatic conditions – or at least our observations of them – are so dazed…
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THE AMERICAN THESAURUS of Slang may one day be the last place you’ll find diner talk, a rich and colorful dialect soon to be as extinct as Aramaic. Adam and Eve on a raft—wreck ’em (an order for two scrambled eggs on toast); massacre the eggs, spoil ’em, wreck ’em (scramble the eggs); flop ’em,…
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JAMES FRANK STARR served aboard the USS Bon Homme Richard. That was an aircraft carrier that sailed in the Navy’s Pacific fleet from late World War II through the Vietnam War. My father, along with the plastic replica of his ship that I assembled as a boy, are the closest I ever got to military…
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EARLIER TODAY I returned to my home in Dallas after visiting family, traveling on Amtrak’s Heartland Express, a line that in about four hours crosses the prairie that flattens out between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Fort Worth, Texas. I took advantage of the peace and quiet, spending the majority of my time writing, but along the way…
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MUSICIAN FRIENDS WILL BE quite impressed when you sprinkle into the conversation a little lyrical lingo from their universe, and one of my favorite old books, the American Thesaurus of Slang, is just the place to find it. Jazz slang, and where I heard it first My own introduction to that world came at a…
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WAITING PATIENTLY ON MY BOOKSHELF for the occasional trip down my father’s Memory Lane is a 65-year old copy of The American Thesaurus of Slang. I think the book is out of print by now, but in its day it must have been the essential reference manual for detectives, sailors, and other niche inhabitants whose…
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