Flexner, Stuart Berg

A notable scholar of slang and colloquial American English, Stuart Berg Flexner was the major author of the first edition of the Dictionary of American Slang (with Harold Wentworth, 1960) and the sole author of the groundbreaking work I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated Treasury of American Words and Phrases (1976). The earlier work was fairly comprehensive in its word list, but excluded the more egregious of the “four-letter” words; it gave citations, but did not follow the historical method completely, since it did not list the different meanings nor date the quotations. However, Flexner illuminated the topic by estimating in the Dictionary of American Slang (1960) that half the entries in the work “could be traced directly to some forty-five general sub-groups of our culture,” from “airplane pilots” to “unskilled factory workers.”

As the title I Hear America Talking implied, the second volume explored the diversity of American idioms, coinages, and key words as an aspect of the nation’s social history, supported by well-chosen illustrations. Words were arranged thematically and alphabetically in 150 entries, from Abolition to Yes and No , and the work was truly comprehensive. Nothing was excluded, so that a reader could proceed from Fuck and Screw , to Fundamentalism , to It Was a Lovely Funeral , to The Gay 90s , to The Germans , and so on. First instances of words were dated as far a possible.

Flexner took an unusually liberated view for the lexicography of the period, as is shown in his concluding comments under Goddamn, Darn and Oh Perdition!:

be it mincing expressions, mild oaths, blasphemy, obscenity or scatology, when I hear America talking I hear America cursing—thank God! What a docile unfeeling people we would be if we didn’t have strong emotions and beliefs that need strong words. It’s good to live in a country where people give a good Goddamn.