Two profane, two obscene

Here’s a fun passage in Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Gutting of Couffignal’, a great story that opens The Big Knockover and Other Stories (whose colourful crooks’ names I listed recently). Skip the first paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers.

‘There’s your choice, Flippo,’ I summed up for him. ‘All I can give you is freedom from San Quentin. The princess can give you a fat cut of the profits in a busted caper, with a good chance to get yourself hanged.’

The girl, remembering her advantage over me, went at him hot and heavy in Italian, a language in which I know only four words. Two are them are profane and the other two obscene. I said all four.

Profanity is when something is considered insulting to a religion, its god(s), or people’s beliefs in them. Obscenity involves offense to taste or common decency, something vulgar enough to be taboo in a given context (often relating to sex or bodily functions). There are legal nuances to both terms, but I won’t get into that here.

Two profane and two obscene words, all presumably common swears, or common in the early 20th century. I can guess what they might be, but maybe Hammett didn’t have four particular words in mind. There are Italian speakers in my family; I’ll run it by them. For research.

Crooks’ names from Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett tells tight, twisty detective tales with colourful casts and propulsive plots, but half the fun of reading him comes from the language itself: the wisecracks, the tough talk, the economical detail.

The title story in his collection The Big Knockover has a huge cast of criminals, crooks, and assorted no-goodniks, many with stereotypical nicknames. Here’s 30 or so, some with additional description from Hammett:

Red O’Leary

The Shivering Kid

Itchy Maker

Darby M’Laughlin

Happy Jim Hacker, round and rosy Detroit gunman twice sentenced to death and twice pardoned

Alphabet Shorty McCoy

Donkey Marr, the last of the bow-legged Marrs

Rumdum Smith

Lefty Read

Toots Salda, the strongest man in crookdom

Sylvia Yount

The Dis-and-Dat Kid

Bernie Bernheimer, alias the Motsa Kid

Sheeny Holmes

Snohomish Shitey

Bluepoint Vance

L. A. Slim, from Denver, sockless and underwearless as usual

Spider Girrucci

Old Pete Best, once a congressman

Fat Boy Clarke

Red Cudahy

Pogy Reeve

Tom Brooks, who invented the Richmond razzle-dazzle and bought three hotels with the profits

Big Flora Brace

Nancy Regan

Denny Burke, Baltimore’s King of Frog Island

Bull McGonickle, still pale from fifteen years in Joliet

Johnny the Plumber

Paddy the Mex, an amiable conman who looked like the King of Spain

Paperbox-John Cardigan

Angel Grace Cardigan

Toby the Lugs, who used to brag about picking President Wilson’s pocket in a Washington vaudeville theatre

*

Alphabet Shorty McCoy offers two nicknames for the price of one. I don’t know if he got both at the same time or was just Shorty McCoy for a while first.

Hammett himself went to jail for a while. His long-time partner Lillian Hellman tells the story in the book’s fine introduction.

Oke is OK

People often wonder whether to write OK, okay, O.K., ok, or o.k. They’re all OK, but the last two are less so – at least in formal styles – and the first may be the most OK of all, nowadays. Some prefer okay because it looks more normal or proper, or because its inflected forms (okayed, okaying) don’t warrant an apostrophe.

The word has many apocryphal etymologies, including Latin omnis korrecta, Scottish och aye, Choctaw oke, German ohne Korrektur, French au quai, and Finnish oikea. But it’s actually an abbreviation of the deliberate misspelling oll korrect.

Monosyllablic forms such as ’kay, kay, and K are common, especially in text messages, internet chat and casual speech, while long versions – like the rhyming reduplications okie-dokie, okey-doke(y), and the Ned Flanders-y okely-dokely or okily-dokily – are also popular. Other variants include okey and the obsolete okeh.

Reading The Dain Curse last week, a 1929 detective novel by Dashiell Hammett,* I came across yet another form:

When we reached the Temple door I had to caution him: ‘Try not breathing so hard. Everything will probably be oke.’

At first I thought it might be pronounced the same, maybe with an unstressed second syllable; but apparently it’s homophonous with oak. Chambers Slang Dictionary says the adjective, as in Hammett, above, occurred in the US in the 1920s–1950s; the exclamation oke! appeared only in the 1930s.

I can’t see it coming back in style, but I guess that’s oke.

*

* See also: Dashiell Hammett on how to be a detective.