Like, learn to talk like surfers, bikers, Southerners, Bostonians and all that, dude.

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Product Description

For twelve years Jim Crotty has been traveling this great country in his roving Monkmobile (don't ask) and in the process has discovered how Americans really speak, from coast to coast and border to border - from Bible Belt Banter to Vegas Vernacular, from Redneck Rhetoric to New England Niceties: Things you need to know about Boston before you go there: Quahog (say co-hog) - oil-slickened red-tide clam, prized by Bostonians for its taste; Santa Fe semantics: Blue corn - sacred food, sold as chips; Seattle-speak: Partly sunny - partly cloudy Crotty's savvy and often hilarious region-by-region guide to the way we talk provides a dead-on (and sometimes too strange) indication of how we think, how we behave, and what we hold dear.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1003566 in Books
• Published on: 1997-07-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.com
Jim "the Mad Monk" Crotty has spent a dozen years on the road traveling around the United States, getting under the skin of the communities in order to discover what makes their wild hearts tick. The fruit of these labors is Monk: The Mobile Magazine, a singularly quirky quarterly publication, coproduced with co-Monk Michael Lane, which spotlights a different community in each issue. How to Talk American is the outgrowth of Monk's hilarious "How to Talk" column, and if you thought you knew how to speak American, well, fegedaboutit (New York), that's monkey (Kentucky). In addition to the lowdown on speaking like an Alaskan, Las Vegan, New Yorker, and Seattleite, Crotty gives up the verbal goods on copspeak, Deadheadian, diner lingo, ecobabble, gutter-punk, Hollywoodese, street slang, and trucker talk. And that's just the beginning. To whet your appetite, these words all mean "cool": crazy, cold-blooded, phat, tight, cuspy, total family kine, fierce, full on, hella, sick, raw, tonar, yar. And these mean "not cool at all": schwag, jurassic, skank. Or at least they did yesterday.

From Library Journal
Crotty has cruised the United States in his "monkmobile" for the past 12 years while coauthoring Monk, an alternative travel magazine. Based on his "how to talk" column, this "guide to our native tongues" is an uneven mix of possibly useful words and gratuitous mockery of regional accents. Some jargon definitions are straightforward, others carry value-laden remarks, and enough errors of basic fact in the text jeopardize the validity of the whole (e.g., a quote by Willie Sutton is attributed to John Dillinger, and Michael Dukakis rather than Walter Mondale is listed as losing to Reagan in 1984). There are no surprising or particularly new terms here, and some are either defined incorrectly (e.g., beltway as "the area inside I-495/95" in Washington, D.C.) or are not unique to an area (e.g., to boot a car is not just a Boston phenomenon). Not recommended.?Cathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Herndon
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
James Marshall Crotty is a contributor for Houghton Mifflin Company titles including: 'How to Talk American'

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Customer Reviews

How to talk like an American
This is a book that is great for reading while waiting in the car or the doctor's office. I wish it were twice as extensive. I enjoy the placing of words in categories.

When my family moved to Houston, TX from Fort Wayne, IN when I was 8, I noticed I couldn't understand older men at first. Part of this was accent; part of it was words. Cactus, y'all, dust storm, soda (we had pop) were just some of the words I had to learn. They just don't come up often here in Indiana. Some things were very different - no winter coats, no heavy sweaters; however, if you go into a store in Houston now, it looks exactly like one in Boston.

A must for " exchange students"
I bought this book when I had foreign exchange students. It was hard to explain:
1. " thank you for sharing": definition for I've heard enough...
2. "What I hear you saying": Definition: I ( host mom) don't really hear what you are saying. I hear how I think you ought to say it. A device to get the questioner ( exchange student) to speed along so the faciliator (me) can speak some more.
3. And then I bought it too.. cause I didn't know what the definition of a dork is ( a cool person)

Thanks, I needed that.

Fun book
I enjoyed reading all sections of this book, but especially the parts about the places I've been. It included phrases from my birthplace of Chicago that I didn't even realize the rest of the country doesn't use. For example, "gapers delay": the traffic jam caused by people slowing or stopping to stare at something, like an accident. My only complaint is that his description was too narrow. In Crotty's definition, a gapers delay is caused one particular billboard which I'm sure is gone by now. But believe me, the gaper's delay is still there somewhere.