How to Talk American: A Guide to Our Native Tongues

Jim "the Mad Monk" Crotty has spent a dozen years on the road traveling around the United States, getting under the skin of the communities in order to discover what makes their wild hearts tick. The fruit of these labors is Monk: The Mobile Magazine, a singularly quirky quarterly publication, coproduced with co-Monk Michael Lane, which spotlights a different community in each issue. How to Talk American is the outgrowth of Monk's hilarious "How to Talk" column, and if you thought you knew how to speak American, well, fegedaboutit (New York), that's monkey (Kentucky). In addition to the lowdown on speaking like an Alaskan, Las Vegan, New Yorker, and Seattleite, Crotty gives up the verbal goods on copspeak, Deadheadian, diner lingo, ecobabble, gutter-punk, Hollywoodese, street slang, and trucker talk. And that's just the beginning. To whet your appetite, these words all mean "cool": crazy, cold-blooded, phat, tight, cuspy, total family kine, fierce, full on, hella, sick, raw, tonar, yar. And these mean "not cool at all": schwag, jurassic, skank. Or at least they did yesterday.