Book Review

Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers

A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century

by Rosemarie Ostler
Oxford University Press
New York, New York
CDN $40.00 (hard cover)

Reviewed by Dalya Goldberger

Rosemarie Ostler makes time travel a real possibility with her book Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers. Decade by decade, she takes readers through the vanishing, yet telling buzzwords, catch phrases, and everyday vocabulary of the 20^th century.

In each self-contained chapter, Ostler demonstrates how major events and trends (e.g., the economy, war, music, fashion, popular culture, scandal) introduced new language into North American culture. The terms she includes show how quotidian turns of phrase can encapsulate the political, psychological, and gender sensibilities of a time. World War II, for example, introduced Rosie the Riveter, iron curtain, glamour boy, and convertible suit to daily speech in the 1940s.

Ostler first incorporates the extensive vocabulary she has compiled into short essays that place the words in their historical and sociological context, and then describes them individually. For those key words and phrases that arguably define a decade, she deepens our understanding by providing more detailed information about their origin, use, and evolution. Some notables include twenty-three skiddoo, no man’s land, jitterbug, zoot suit, beatnik, punk, keep on truckin’, dude, and information superhighway.

For those of us who are too young to be familiar with words like automat, Hooverville, dicky-bird, and passion pit, and their broader historical meaning, the occasional photo aids our understanding. For those of us who can remember their use, the photos provide a dose of wistful nostalgia. An automat (1900–1919), for example, was a self-serve cafeteria where food was displayed in see-through compartments (similar to today’s vending machines). People would select the food item of their choice, insert a coin, open the compartment door, and take out the food item. Automat employees replenished the food from behind.

What makes the book’s decade-by-decade format work is Ostler’s preference for introducing the terms in the decade in which they resonate most rather than in the decade in which they were first uttered. I found myself majorly psyched to reach the “Eighties”—the chapter on the decade that defined my generation—and read about the familiar (and ridiculous) language of my early teen years. Totally tubular, grody to the max, gag me with a spoon. Did I really use those expressions? A subconscious giggle (and my parents) tells me that I did, for a brief time anyway.

The book’s organization also enables readers to track the changing nature of various terms. Lice, for example, had dozens of labels throughout the century, including cooties (1900 to 1919), crums (1930s), and motorized freckles (1940s). The term for kissing also had several incarnations: flinging woo (1920s), smash-mouth (1960s), boxing tonsils or sucking face (1980s).

Rosemarie Ostler is definitely on the beam when it comes to the words that shaped the 20^th century. If you want to relive your youth or go back in time to take a sneak peek into the minds of your forebears, take Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers along as a travelling companion.

It’s been real.

Dalya Goldberger is the Managing Editor of Writer’s Block. Listen for her from time to time on Paul Castle’s “That’s a Good Question” segment on CBC radio in Saint John, New Brunswick, and CBC’s "Daybreak" in Prince George, British Columbia.