Damn the Man by Tom Dalzell

The title of this book immediately made me think of the amazingly funny Jack Black and his role in School of Rock. Then I read the subtitle...Slang of the Oppressed in America...and my interest was peaked (then I read the quote at the beginning from the super duper great movie from my teenage years Empire Records and I was like, "smile!").

Being an English teacher, I am always interested in and curious about words: where do they come from? why do we use certain words? who decides what is "cool" and what isn't? This book begins to answer some of these questions.

In a nutshell, this book explains how slang is used by specific groups of people to resist their oppression in this country. The groups are presented in the following order: African Americans, Prisoners, The Military,  Gay Men, Hippies, Workers of the World, Jewish Immigrants, and Mexican Americans.

What was interesting to me about this book was that I say some of these words almost every day, and I never understood where they came from and how they showed up in my vocabulary. The first word discussed is the word "man". This term was adopted by African Americans in response to being referred to as "boy", "mammy", or "uncle" in order to bestow "respect where respect had been denied" (12). After each explanation or definition, examples of the term are presented in order to help the reader understand how each term can be used in regular conversation. From the slang "man", a progression to family terms such as "sister" and "brother" was developed in order to create "a new, positive self-identity" (13) among African Americans.

Dalzell continues to present different slang and discuss how words help certain cultures of people to deal with the oppression they suffer. While I appreciate some slang, I hate to think that certain words were actually developed as a reaction to hatred and prejudice against certain groups of people. I continue to as the question "Why can't we all just get along?".

This book presented me with a very interesting look at language that surrounds me today. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in slang and how certain words came to be accepted into our every day conversation.