From thegestianpoet

(via imnotuniqueimmonique)

(via psychmajors)

Eastern State Hospital, America’s first psychiatric hospital located in Williamsburg, Virginia

currentlyinapickle:

Evelyn Nesbit 1884-1967

Chorus girl, model, and “the lethal beauty” who is rumored to have been the muse for the sculpture of “Diana,” commissioned by architect Standford White, that once sat atop Madison Square Garden.

sassy-starfish:

Ab-so-lute-ly - affirmative 

All Wet - describes an erroneous idea or individual, as in, “he’s all wet.”

And How - I strongly agree! 

Applesauce- an expletive same as horsefeathers, As in “Ah applesauce!”

Attaboy - well done!; also Attagirl! 

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Baby - sweetheart. Also denotes something of high value or respect.

Balled Up - confused, messed up 

Baloney - nonsense! 

Bank’s Closed - no kissing or making out - i.e. - “Sorry, Mac, the bank’s closed.” 

Bearcat - a hot-blooded or fiery girl 

Beat it - scam or get lost 

Beat one’s gums - idle chatter 

Bee’s Knees - An extraordinary person, thing, idea; the ultimate

Beef - a complaint or to complain 

Beeswax - business, i.e. None of your beeswax.” 

Bell bottom -a sailor

Berries - That which is attractive or pleasing; similar to bee’s knees, As in “It’s the berries.”

Bible Belt -Area in the South and Midwest where Fundamentalism flourishes

Big Cheese - The most important or influential person; boss. Same as big shot

Big six - a strong man; from auto advertising, for the new and powerful; six cylinder engines 

Bimbo - a tough guy 

Bird - general termfor a man or woman, sometimes meaning “odd,” i.e. “What a funny old bird.” 

Blind Date - going out with someone you do not know

Bluenose - An excessively puritanical person, a prude, Creator of “the Blue Nozzle Curse.”

Bootleg - illegal liquor

Breezer - an convertible car 

Bronx Cheer - A loud splutteringnoise, used to indicate disapproval. Same as raspberry

Bull - (1) a policeman or law-enforcement officer including FBI (2) nonsense (3) to chat idly, to exaggerate 

Bull Session - Male talkfest, gossip, stories of sexual exploits

Bum’s rush - ejection by force from an establishment 

Bump Off - To murder,To kill

Butt me - I’ll take a cigarette 

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Caper - a criminal act or robbery 

Carry a Torch - To have acrush on someone

Cash - a kiss

Cash or check? - Do you kiss now or later? 

Cat’s Meow - Something splendid or stylish; similar to bee’s knees; The best or greatest, wonderful.

Cat’s Pajamas - Same as cat’s meow

Chassis - the female body 

Cheaters - Eyeglasses

Check - kiss me later 

Ciggy - cigarette 

Clam - a dollar 

Copacetic - Wonderful, fine, all right

Crush - An infatuation

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Daddy - a youngwoman’s boyfriend or lover, especially if he’s rich 

Dame - a female 

Dapper - a Flapper’s dad 

Darb - An excellent person or thing (as in “the Darb” - a person with money who can be relied on to pay the check)

Dead soldier - an empty bear bottle 

Deb - an debutant 

Dick - a private investigator 

Dogs - feet

Doll - an attractive woman 

Dolled up - dressed up 

Don’t know from nothing - don’t have any information 

Don’t take any wooden nickels - Don’t do anything stupid

Double-cross - to cheat, stab in the back 

Dough - money 

Drugstore Cowboy - a guy that hangs around on a street corner trying to pick up girls

Dry up - shut up, get lost 

Ducky - very good 

Dumb Dora - a stupid female

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Earful - enough 

Edge - intoxication, a buzz.  i.e. “I’ve got an edge.” 

Egg - a person who lives the big life 

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Fall Guy -Victim of a frame

Fire extinguisher - a chaperone 

Fish -(1) a college freshman
(2) a first timer in prison 

Flat Tire - A dull witted, insipid, disappointing date. Same as pill, pickle, drag, rag, oilcan

Flivver - a Model T; after 1928, could mean any old broken down car 

Flapper - A stylish, brash, hedonistic young woman with short skirts & shorter hair

Fly boy - a glamorous term for an aviator 

Frame - To give false evidence , to set up someone

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Gams - A woman’s legs

Get a wiggle on - get a move on, get going 

Giggle Water - An intoxicating beverage; alcohol

Gin Mill - An establishment where hard liquor is sold; bar

Glad rags - “going out on the town” clothes 

Gold Digger - A woman who associates with or marries a man for his wealth

Goofy - in love 

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Hair of the Dog - a shot of alcohol 

Handcuff - an engagement ring 

Hard Boiled -a tough, strong guy

Hayburner - (1) a gas guzzling car (2) a horse one loses money on 

Heebie-Jeebies - The jitters

High-Hat - To snub

Hit on all sixes - to perform 100 per cent; as “hitting on all six cyclinders”

Hooch - Bootleg liquor

Hood - hoodlum 

Hoofer - Dancer

Horsefeathers - an expletive ; same usage as applesauce

Hotsy - Totsy - Pleasing

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It - Sexappeal

Iron - a motorcycle 

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Jack - money 

Jake - OK, as in , ”Everything is Jake.”

Jalopy - Oldcar

Jane - any female 

Java - coffee 

Jitney - a car employed as a private bus. Fare was usually five cents; also called a “nickel” 

Joe - coffee 

John - a toilet

Joint - an establishment

Juice Joint - a speakeasy

Joint - A club, usually selling alcohol

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Keen - Attractive or appealing

Kisser - Mouth

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Left holding the bag - (1) to be cheated out of one’s fair share (2) to be blamed for something 

Level with me - be honest 

Line - Insincere flattery

Live wire - a lively person 

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Middle Aisle - To marry

Mrs. Grundy - A priggish or extremely tight-laced person

Moll - A gangster’s girl

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Neck - Kissing with passion

Nifty - great, excellent

“Now you’re on the trolley!” - Now you’ve got it, now you’re right!

Nobody Home - Describes some one who is dumb

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On the lam - fleeing from police

On the level - legitimate, honest

On the up and up - on the level

Orchid - an expensive item

Ossified - a drunk person

Owl - a person who’s outlate

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Palooka (1) a below-average or average boxer (2) a social outsider, from the comic strip character Joe Palooka

Pet - Same as neck, but more so

Piker - (1) a cheapskate (2) a coward

Pill - (1) a teacher (2) an unlikable person

Pinch - To arrest

Pipe down - stop talking

Pushover - A person easily convinced or seduced

Putting on the Ritz- after the Ritz hotel in Paris; doing something in high style

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Rag-a-muffin - a dirty or disheveled individual

Razz- to make fun of

   

Real McCoy - The genuine article

Ritzy - Elegant (from the hotel)

Rubes - money or dollars

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Sap - afool

Says you - a reactionof disbelief

Scram - Ask someone to leave immediately

Sheba - A woman with sex appeal (from the move Queen of Sheba) or (e.g. Clara Bow)

Sheik - A man with sex appeal (from the Valentino movies)

Shiv - a knife

Sinker - a doughnut

Speakeasy - An illicit bar selling bootleg liquor

Spifflicated - Drunk. The same as canned, corked, tanked, primed, scrooched, jazzed, zozzled, plastered, owled, embalmed, lit, potted, ossified or fried to the hat

Spiffy - An elegant appearance

Spoon - to neck, or at least talk of love

Struggle Buggy - the backseat of a car. A parent’s worst nightmare

Stuck On - Having a crush on

Swanky - Ritzy

Swell - Wonderful. Also: a rich man

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Take for a Ride - To drive off with someone in order to bump them off

Tin Pan Alley - the music industry in New York, located between 48th and 52nd street

Tomato - a female

Torpedo - A hired gun

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Upchuck - To vomit when one has drunk too much

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Wet Blanket - a solemn person, a killjoy

What’s eating you? - What’s wrong

Whoopee - To have a good time

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You slay me - that’s funny

henrydlacklaw:

Last time we looked at a blue-collar Bostonian. Today we’re gonna do a 360 and look at two of the most prominent New Yorkers in American history.

Norman Mailer, though he could be charming, is certainly the most assholish of the people I’ve covered so far. Though he could be very charming, he was incredibly egotistical and a mean drunk. He headbutted (yes actually headbutted) Gore Vidal before going on the Dick Cavett show with him. He also once stabbed his wife with a penknife. He was a brilliant and gifted man, having entered Harvard at the age of 16 and went on to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, and as a result his ego stretched from Montauk to Secaucus. He was a talented journalist and an acomplished novelist; he authored The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song, and until Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow came on the scene and sent his pseudo-journalistic realism crying home to mommy Mailer was considered America’s greatest post-WWII novelist.

He was born in Long Branch, NJ, within the New York City dialect’s sphere of influence but outside of the r-dropping area (which covers New York City, all of Long Island, Westchester County, and many speakers in northeastern parts of New Jersey, as well as some speakers as far north as Albany). He was born to a well-to-do Jewish family (his father came from South Africa) and grew up in Brooklyn, graduating from a fairly prestigious high school. After Harvard, he served in the military during WWII, where he began speaking in what he called a Texas accent in order to hide the fact that he was Jewish from the other servicemen. As he rose to prominence through his work as a novelist and a journalist he became a political activist, eventually running for mayor of New York City on a platform that would, among other things, declare New York City and independent state, make all of NYC’s neighbourhoods into independent cities with their own police, fire, and school services, and ban cars from the island of Manhattan (buses, trucks, and taxis would be exempted). He ended up not only not coming in last place but coming in third. He had opinions on nearly everything, also opposed the flouridation of New York City water and advocated for the release of Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panther Party. Though his personal political leanings were more a left-wing libertarianism that anything else, he supported the Democratic Party throughout his life.

Gore Vidal, the very model of an East Coast aristocrat, was known for his work as a journalist and a novelist but mostly for his venomous wit (for which he was often compared to Oscar Wilde) and his vicious feuds with Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, among others. He was born in West Point, New York, son of an aeronautics expert (who had once had an affair with Amelia Earhart) for the US military and the founder of multiple airlines, and grew up in very prestigious boarding schools in Washington, DC. His grandfather, a Senator from Oklahoma and a committed isolationist, spent a lot of time with him and was deeply influential in the development of Vidal’s political views, which were characteristic of the New Left of the late 60s and early 70s (though he considered himself a consevative and opposed immigration, very much in keeping with the traditions of his class). His favourite politican (also my favourite) was Huey Long. Vidal considered himself pansexual, and moreover rejected the concepts of homosexual and heterosexual, publicly stating much to the chagrin of William F. Buckley and other conservative Americans that everyone is pansexual to a certain degree. He spoke in a very patrician accent, speaking slowly, clearly, and r-lessly.

This clip here is from one of the most famous hours in television history. The two public intellectuals, with Dick Cavett and famed journalist Janet Flanner (another excellent example of an upper-crust East Coast accent) watching, feuded and traded insults on the Dick Cavett show. Note Mailer’s idiosyncratic manner of speaking, particularly note his articulation of the vowel in words like caught (the New York City dialect is known for having an articulation of this vowel further back in the mouth than anywhere else in the English-speaking world) and how it often fluctuates (he was drunk that night), and note Vidal’s very patrician speech. Mostly though, enjoy, because this is just hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw

Bonus video: Gore Vidal’s wit pisses William F. Buckley off so much that he calls him a queer and threatens to “sock [him] in the goddamn face.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8

For our next installment we’ll be heading down South and filling ourselves with the spirit of the Lord (and non-rhoticity). Oh glory! If you have any guesses as to who our next asshole will be, write his name on the back of a 20 dollar bill (CAD or USD) or an authentic Louis Quatorze commode and send it to the Department of Lacklology.

dont-britta-this:

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

lambandserpent:

The other September 11th

1973 Chilean coup d’état

The 1973 Chilean coup d’état was a watershed event of the Cold War and the history of Chile. On Tuesday 11 September 1973, the democratically elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup d’état organised by the Chilean military and endorsed by the United States. A military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet took control of the government, composed of the heads of the Air Force, Navy, Carabineros (police force) and the Army .^[1] Pinochet later assumed power and ended Allende’s democratically elected Popular Unity government.^[2][3]

During the air raids and ground attacks that preceded the coup, Allende gave his last speech, in which he vowed to stay in the presidential palace.^[4] Direct witness accounts of his death agree that he committed suicide in the palace.^[5][6] After the coup, Pinochet established a military dictatorship that ruled Chile until 1990; it was marked by severe human rights violations. A weak insurgent movement against the Pinochet government was maintained inside Chile by elements sympathetic to the former Allende government.

The U.S. Government’s hostility to the election of Socialist President Salvador Allende government was substantiated in documents declassified during the Clinton administration.^[26] The CIA inserted covert operatives in Chile, in order to prevent a Marxist government from arising, and conducted propaganda operations which were designed to push the Chilean president Eduardo Frei to support “a military coup which would prevent Allende from taking office on the 3rd of November.”^[27][28]

Pinochet is alleged to be responsible for various human rights abuses during his reign including murder and torture of political opponents. According to a government commission report that included testimony from more than 30,000 people, Pinochet’s government killed at least 3,197 people and tortured about 29,000. Two-thirds of the cases listed in the report happened in 1973.^[91]

^{Read more about Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror here}

henrydlacklaw:

I have been inspired to start a new series of posts about horrible human beings with beautiful accents. We shall begin this series with none other than Strom Thurmond, a man so shockingly horrible yet so damn fascinating that you can’t help but admire the hell out of him. He gave a 24 hour filibuster speech in the Senate against civil rights but raped his black maid when he was a teenager. He then supported the child produced from that rape financially until he died, obviously to shut her up. He ended up marrying not one but two Miss South Carolinas, became the first President Pro Tempore Emeritus (the position was actually created for him because he was so old) and died at the age of 100 as the oldest and longest serving member of the Senate in American history, having never disavowed his support for segregation. Here is a clip of him speaking in 1968 against the nomination of a guy named Abe Fortas to the Supreme Court. Note his non-rhoticity and in particular his articulation of the word “hurt”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecy0yRpL8cw

henrydlacklaw:

Part 2 of my Assholes with Beautiful Accents series is none other than American arch-conservative and public intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr. Not an asshole in the traditional sense, but certainly not a particularly great man. Linguistically  he was a bit of an anomaly. He was born in New York City  to a wealthy oil baron of Irish and Southern ancestry. He spent his earliest years in Mexico; consequently his first language was Spanish. He then moved to Connecticut, and then began formal education in Paris, where he learned his second language, French. It was not until age 7 that he started learning English in a formal setting when he began school in England. He finished his secondary education in Millbrook School in Dutchess County, New York, a popular school among the old East Coast upper crust.

His devout Catholic oil baron father raised Buckley with what was then a very rare ideological combination: economic libertarianism and traditional American conservatism. With this upbringing Buckley became the driving force behind the American conservative movement, pioneering the form of conservative espoused by Goldwater and Reagan. However, Buckley denounced the Bush administration as not being truly conservative, strongly implied that the Iraq War was a very bad idea, and supported the legalisation of marijuana. He felt that a true conservative would be both fiscally and socially libertarian and that morality should be taught by the church, not the state.

Buckley wrote many books on his political views and also wrote a few spy novels. He was an accomplished piano player, but his personal favourite musical instrument was the harpsichord (a sentiment with which I agree whole-heartedly, though Coltrane has certainly turned me onto the alto sax. Note to self: invent jazz harpsichord.).

Buckley’s accent is highly unique: it’s something of a cross between the Queen’s English, a traditional East Coast upper crust transatlantic accent, and an aristocratic Southern accent (such as the one from our first Asshole [and Asshole Emeritus] Strom Thurmond). He’s one of the few people in the world who can truly be said to have his own dialect all to himself.

In this video Buckley takes question from the audience along with Woody Allen, another fine accent. Note the differences in the approach to language found between Woody and Buckley. Though the two accents share most phonological features, they still sound drastically different. Some of the audience members asking questions also demonstrate rather interesting features.

What is most remarkable, however, is Buckley’s ability to laugh at his own political views. Very few American conservatives today are willing or able to demonstrate such an honourable trait. So, friends, enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNErWi_lTig