Heaneyland!: I picture the young John Travolta as "Beefy"

August 11, 2006

I picture the young John Travolta as "Beefy"

While walking to dinner from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Wednesday night (where we had been checking out the corpse flower), Rose and I passed that guy who sells books down the street from the library, and Rose spotted an amazing book: the Hip Reader (Volume 2), from 1972.

It's an easy reader, meant for older readers than, say, Dick and Jane Have Fun, but what makes it wonderful is its desperate attempt to be down with the hip young people and their funky slang. (Hmm...I feel like that reminds me of something.) There's a definite "See Dick. See Dick get his groove on. Get that righteous groove on, Dick, yeah, get it on" vibe. To give you some idea, I present the story of "Poor Beefy".

In case you'd like to do a little preparation, here's a list of the vocabulary words you can expect to see in the story, which follows:

Truly a bad scene.

I'll be posting more scans from the book in the fullness of time; until then, practice what you have learned.

Posted by Francis at 03:00 AM

Comments

I don't think I caught the definition of "Deena."

Posted by: Tablesaw at August 11, 2006 07:00 AM

This story was brought to you by the phoneme /i/.

Posted by: David. at August 11, 2006 09:02 AM

If you write "flick" as a crossword answer it looks naughty.

Posted by: ruby at August 11, 2006 09:52 AM

These people look like zombies. Hey, that's an /i/ word too! Sweet! Hey, that's another one! I am on FIRE!

Posted by: Robin at August 11, 2006 10:44 AM

"Beefy" feels like one of those names you'd find in They'll Do It Every Time (which is, of course, the absolute king of "tries to sound hip and fails by 50 years").

Deena should have thrown in a "You creep!" to get in one more /i/ word and still sound faux-hip, if you ask me.

Posted by: Trip at August 11, 2006 11:59 AM

I must to agree with Treep.

And what's this about dancing? "Will you smoke some weed with me, Deena?"

Posted by: rubee at August 11, 2006 01:43 PM

Another nice example of the genre: http://slumbering.lungfish.com/images/dccomicsprice.png

Someone should do a site of this stuff, a la engrish.com.

Posted by: Rick at August 11, 2006 06:03 PM

Holy Xanax, Francis -- speaking of books, I just noticed you got spammed by a character from The Master and Margarita. (!!!) (?) (See your previous blog entry.) Is it possible for a spamming e-mail address to show up here as an entered name, and with a link?

Posted by: Rublyovska at August 11, 2006 10:10 PM

Apparently.

Posted by: Francis at August 12, 2006 12:52 AM