Gettin' Too Slangy? A great writing resource.

Slang seems to be a part of our daily conversations, creeping into our language like well…a dog in a doublet.  If it hadn’t been for this wonderful book, I’d never have known what a “dog in a doublet” was.  You might want to take a moment or two to ponder that phrase while I give credit to award winning author, Randall Platt, www.plattbooks.com  for sharing her list of references with me. 

Randall, like me, spends much of her writing time creating the past.  For a writer of historical fiction, this means a lot of things like researching clothing, housing, transportation, and a myriad of other details that beg to be placed correctly in time and place.  As I worked on my most recent book, set in 1896, I kept finding myself slipping into what sounded like more modern speech.  Several phrases popped up with questionable etymologies.  For a quick fix, I usually rely on an online etymological dictionary…easy to use and searchable online.  But unless I got lucky, this resource didn’t help for idioms or slang.

Randi gave me several suggestions for references to try, but the one I settled on for starters is Casell’s Dictionary of Slang.  My version is about 1500 words and expressions are listed alphabetically; it’s easy to use, and it dates everything by the first year an expression came into common use. It also gives an approximate end date if appropriate.  Example:  “dog in a doublet” [late 17C—early 19C]

As it happened, this book came into my hands during a time when I was rewriting an out of print book for the purpose of creating an electronic copy.  When I started the rewrite I was agonizing over whether to update the book to make it more contemporary or keep it as originally written…late 1960’s early 1970’s.  I decided to stick with the older dates and found myself flipping continually through “Casell’s” to determine when “high five” came into use or “far out”.  

Oddly, I lived through that era, but for the life of me never really paid much attention to the etymologies of what came out of my mouth.  This reference book turned out to be an enormous help wading through old expression and for verifying that the language for the book was targeted correctly.

So now I know you’ve been dying to find out what “dog in a doublet” means so here goes:  a daring bold person; thus proud as a dog in a doublet, very proud, amere dog in a doublet, a pitiful figure , one who shows off to no avail. [the custom in Germany and Flanders to dress the dogs used to hunt wild boar in a form of buff doublet]

I never would have known that without access to this reference book.  In fact, I think it’s such a good phrase, it stands to be revived in the 20^th century!  I can think of several people it might apply to, but I'm better not to mention names...

Language is changing constantly, and one can only imagine, with the rapid changes in the world around us, what “Casell’s Dictionary of Slang” might look like in ten more years.  For now, I find it a helpful resource for any genre of writing and plan to keep it near at hand when I write.

Cheerio…  phr [1910 +]  1. Goodbye.