Afterword Three

Slang is Timeless

For my novel, She Murdered Me with Science, I had to study a lot about 1953. One of the most interesting things to research was slang. How much slang we hear in movies was actually used in that era?

I came across a great book: Straight from the Fridge, Dad, by Max Décharné. Décharné not only provided his readers the most complete dictionary of the slang terms from the thirties through the sixties, but also gave examples of when the expression was first recorded (for example, a man’s feet, as “dogs,” can be traced back to Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 book, Red Harvest).

So, how does this play out in this novel? Slang has no definitive time line. There are expressions from the fifties we still use today. We call a heart a “pump,” which was heard in 1941’s Maltese Falcon. Also, regions have dialects and expressions that might be in use for years before they come to national attention.

This means that many of the characters, Noel and Lee specifically, use a lot of slang from their era and the eras around them. However, I have tried to limit the selection to slang terms they would say, not just throwing them in because I can.

Please enjoy my story and forgive any slights I may have made in regard to slang. I wanted to keep the flair of a fifties pulp novel, but you will be the only judge of how close I have gotten.