As Cory Doctorow has pointed out here on Boing Boing, Brett and Kate McKay's The Art of Manliness is an essential resource for all things manly. Cory blogged the site's "Dictionary of Manly 19th Century Vernacular," but my tastes run more to "Talk Like Frank Sinatra." I should point out that I've done my own research in this area. In 1987, on my way to Las Vegas to write about the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon for Newsweek — a telethon at which Sinatra himself appeared, albeit on video — I spent a good part of the plane trip poring over Kitty Kelley's "My Way" and picking out useful bits of Rat Pack-ese, my favorite being "The Big Casino" (i.e., Death). But nothing in the Kelley book approaches the McKays' guide for sheer comprehensivness. It's a treasure trove of Sinatraspeak, from Harvey ("A man or woman who acts in a stupid or naive fashion; sometimes shortened to a "Harve") to Twirl ("A girl who loves dancing. An alternative word with the same meaning is a "Twist"). Paired with Gay Talese's awe-inspiring Esquire profile from 1966, "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold," the glossary provides everything you ever needed to know about mid-'60s cool. It's a gasser.
Talk like Sinatra
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