Once “oiks” (n. a disagreeable youth, U.K., 1925) have overrun completely the civilized world, we ladies and gentlemen won’t be able to make out a word they’re saying. As Theodore Dalrymple noted, writing on A Clockwork Orange in the Winter 2006 City Journal, there’s a crystal-clear reason for that:

[Burgess] marks the separateness of his novel’s young protagonists from their elders by their adoption of a new argot … . Vital for groups antagonistic toward the dominant society around them, such argots allow them to identify and communicate with insiders and exclude outsiders. Although I worked in a prison for fourteen years … I never came to understand the language that prisoners used.

We now possess, like a Berlitz guide to the language of the End Times, a marvelous new two-volume dictionary of “slang...

 

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