analyzing beat slang

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Now a more general withdrawal, from experiencing altogether, is expressed by the omnicapable word “like.”  E.g.g, “Like I’m sleepy,” meaning “if I experienced anything, it would be feeling sleepy.”  “Like if I go to like New York, I’ll look you up,” indicating that in this definite and friendly promise, there is no felt purpose in that trip or any trip.  Technically, “like” is here a particular expressing a tonality or attitude of utterance, like the Greek uev, verily, or on, now look.  “Like” expresses adolescent embarrassment or diffidence.  Thus, if I talk to a young fellow and give him the security of continued attention, the “like” at once vanishes and is replaced by “You know,” “I mean,” “You know what I mean,” similarly interposed in every sentence.

The vocative expletive “Man,” however, has different nuances in different groups.  Among the Beats it is used diffidently and means, “We are not small children, man, and anyway like we are playing together as like grown-up.”  Among Negroes, it is often more aggressive and means, “Man, now don’t you call me boy or inferior.”  Among proper hipster it means, “We are not sexually impotent.”  So far as I can hear, it never means acceptance of the speakers as adult males, nor does it have the ring of respect or admiration (Mensch), as a woman or hero worshiping boys might use it.  When the interlocautor is in fact respected or feared, he would not be called “man.”  (Perhaps “boss”?)

“Cool,” being unruffled and alert, has the same nuances.  In standard English a man “keeps cool in an emergency.”  If there is always an emergency, it must imply that the danger is internal as well as external:  the environment is dangerous and feeling is dangerous.  As spoken and enacted by a young Beat, maintaining a mask-face and tapping his toe quietly to the jazz, it means, “I do not feel out of place, I am not abandoned and afraid, I am not going to burst into tears.”  In the original Negro the nuance is rather, “I’ll stay unruffled and keep out of trouble around here; I won’t let on what I feel, these folks are dangerous.”  With the hipster, the jaw is more set and the eyes more calculating, and it means, “I’m on to your game, you can’t make me flip.”  In general, coolness and mask-face are remaining immobile in order to conceal embarrassment, temper, or uncontrollable anxiety.

To make a remark about the language as a whole as used by the Beats:  Its Negro base is, I think, culturally accidental; bu the paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning.  On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin.  But this can have disadvantages.  One learns to one’s frustration that they regard talk as end in itself, as a means of self expression, without subject matter. […]

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Let us now go back to the jargon.  The supreme words are “crazy,” “far out,” “gone,” “high,” “gas,” “sent.”  These mean not in this world but somewhere, not rational but something.  “Flip” is generally used with enthusiastic self-deprecation.

When the crazy or far-out moment can be maintained for long enough to be considered a something and somewhere, it is “groovy,” that is, one is like somebody else’s phonograph record.  One is “with it” or “falls in.”  The “it” or the understood “where” is not, of course, definite, for pure being has no genus and differentia.  “Swinging with it” is the condition of passing from here and now to the heightened experience of “it.”

Contrariwise, it is bad and painfrul to be “nowhere,” to “fall out” (take an overdose), or to be “drug” (dragging).

The way of being-in-the-world, that is, is to be either cool and mask-faced, experiencing little; or to be sent far out, experiencing something.  However, since the cool behavior of these usually gentle middle-class boys looks like adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness rather younger than their years, one wonders whether ordinary growth in experience would not be a more profitable enterprise and ultimately get them much further out.

A possibility that has interestingly dropped from Beat culture is the exploitation of shared athletic or wildly physical agitation, which belonged grandly to the old jazz-for-dancing and revival meetings.  This is certainly an important truth in Mailer’s proposition that jive is energetic, in words like “go” and “dig.”

(To the jazz-for-listening one is not supposed to respond overtly by more than a quietly tapped toe.  It can then by hypnotic or a hearth fire.  As music it remarkably thin grue (no doubt I am tone deaf).  For the performer, of course, it provides the deepening absorption of any simple improvised variations, plus the solidarity of the group.) […]

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To repeat, Beat is not a strong position and it can hardly work out well.  The individual young man is threatened either with retreating back to the organized system or breaking down and sinking into the lumpen proletariat.  Nevertheless, culturally there is a lot of strength there; let us try to see where it is.

Considered directly, their politics are unimpressive.  They could not be otherwise since they are so hip and sure that society cannot be different.  Explicitly, they are pacifists, being especially vocal about the atom bomb.  The Bomb is often mentioned by themselves and other commentators an explanation of their religious crisis; but it’s not convincing.  Their own diatribes seem to be mostly polemical self-defense, as if to say: “You squares dropped an atom bomb, don’t you are criticize my smoking marijuana.”  In the play The Connection this is openly stated as a defense for heroin.  On the whole one does not observe that the Beats are so concerned about nuclear weapons as many mothers of families or squares who have common sense.  One of the Beat spokesmen wrote a long dithyramb about the Bomb, of which the critic George Dennison remarked:  “He seems miffed that people pay attention to the atom bomb instead of to him.”

 

–Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd, 1968

And his review of On the Road — Appendix E — is, like, the Greatest Thing Ever, Man.

One is stunned at how conventional and law-fearing these lonely middle-class fellows are. They dutifully get legal marriages and divorces. The hint of a “gangbang” makes them impotent.  They never masturbate or perform homosexual acts.  They do not dodge the draft.  They are hygienic about drugs and diet. They do not resent being underpaid, nor speak up at all. To disobey a cop is “all hell.”  Their idea of crime is the petty shoplifting of ten-year-olds stealing cigarettes or of teen-agers joy riding in other people’s cars.  But how could it be otherwise? It is necessary to have some contact with institutions and people in order to rebel against them. It is necessary to want something in order to be frustrated and angry. They have the theory that to be affectless, not to care, is the ultimate rebellion, but this is a fantasy; for right under the surface, obvious to a trained eye, is burning shame, hurt feelings, fear of impotence, speechless and powerless tantrum, cowering before papa, being rebuffed by mama; and it is these anxieties that dictate their behavior in every crisis. Their behavior is a conformity plus royaliste que le roi. […]

The style of life resulting from all this is an obsessional conformity, busy-ness without any urge toward the goals of activity, whether ideal goals or wealth and power.
There is not much difference between the fellows “on the road” and the “organization men” they frequently exchange places.

I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious of course. (Page 15.)

On other occasions, they eat franks and beans. More rarely hamburgers, malted milks, of course. That is, the drink-down quick-sugar foods of spoiled children, and the pre-cut meat for lazy chewing beloved of ages six to ten. Nothing is bitten or bitten-off, very little is chewed; there is a lot of sugar for animal energy, but not much solid food to grow on. I suppose that this is the most significant observation one can make about On The Road.

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