Replace the following slang with acceptable English:
We pulled a new wrinkle.
He's an easy mark.
Oh, you're nutty.
Beat it.
I have all the inside dope.
You can't bamboozle me.
What a phiz the bloke has!
You're talking through your hat.
We had a long confab with the gink.
He's loony over that chicken.
The prof. told us to vamoose.
Take a squint at the girl with the specs.
Ain't it fierce the way they swipe umbrellas?
Goodnight, how she claws the ivory!
Nix on the rough stuff.
And there I got pinched by a cop for parking my Tin Lizzie.
<Wordiness>
As a precaution against tameness you should cultivate spontaneity and
daring. As a precaution against slovenliness you should cultivate
freshness and accuracy. But to display spontaneity, daring, freshness,
accuracy you must have or acquire a large stock, a wide range, of words.
Now this possession, like any other, brings with it temptation. If we have
words, we like to use them. Nor do we wait for an indulgence in this
luxury until we have consciously set to work to amass a vocabulary.
Verbosity is, in truth, the besetting linguistic sin. Most people are
lavish with words, as most people are lavish with money. This is not to
say that in the currency of language they are rich. But even if they lack
the means--and the desire--to be extravagant, they yet make their
purchases heedlessly or fail to count their linguistic change. The degree
of our thrift, not the amount of our income or resources, is what marks us
as being or not being verbal spendthrifts. The frugal manager buys his
ideas at exactly the purchase price. He does not expend a twenty-dollar
bill for a box of matches.
Have words by all means, the more of them the better, but use them
temperately, sparingly. Do not think that a passage to be admirable must
be studded with ostentatious terms. Consider the Gettysburg Address or the
Parable of the Prodigal Son. These convey their thought and feeling
perfectly, yet both are simple--exquisitely simple. They strike us indeed
as being inevitable--as if their phrasing could not have been other than
it is. They have, they are, finality. What could glittering phraseology
add to them? Nothing; it could only mar them. Yet Lincoln and the
Scriptural writers were not afraid to use big words when occasion
required. What they sought was to make their speech adequate without
carrying a superfluous syllable.
"The sun set" is more natural and effective than "The celestial orb that
blesses our terrestrial globe with its warm and luminous rays sank to its
nocturnal repose behind the western horizon." Great writers--the true
masters--have often held "fine writing" and pretentious speaking up to
ridicule. Thus Shakespeare has Kent, who has been rebuked for his
bluntness, indulge in a grandiloquent outburst:
"Sir, in good sooth, in sincere verity,
Under the allowance of your grand aspect,
Whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire
On flickering Phoebus' front,--"
No wonder Kent is interrupted with a "What meanest by this?" Sometimes
great writers use ornate utterance for humorous effects. Thus Dickens
again and again has Mr. Micawber express a commonplace idea in sounding
terms which at length fail him, so that he must interject an "in short"
and summarize his meaning in a phrase amusing through its homely contrast.
But humor based on ponderous diction is too often wearisome. Better say
simply "He died," or colloquially "He kicked the bucket," than "He
propelled his pedal extremities with violence against the wooden pail
which is customarily employed in the transportation of the aquatic fluid."