Variety’s ‘Slanguage’ Needs Some Translating
“STICKS NIX HICK PIX.”
Anyone who immediately understood that probably is among the elite, the effete, the neat and the really beat in show business.
Or, in the “slanguage” of Variety, a “solon,” a pundit, a person in the know, an authority, or at least someone who thinks he or she is.
The rest of us need a translation. It’s one of Variety’s most famous headlines: rural or small-town audiences reject corny “country” films.
Some of us might even feel as stupid as George Bernard Shaw, who once said: “I thought I knew the English language until one day I saw Variety in a friend’s home. Upon my soul, I didn’t understand a word of it.”
“We don’t really much understand it ourselves, which is also kind of interesting,” said Gerry Byrne, publisher of the publication that first went to press Dec. 16, 1905.
Speaking at the recent opening of a 90th anniversary exhibit of Variety headlines at the Museum of Television & Radio, he then went into a little Varietyspeak: “We’re delighted and honored to celebrate our boffo annie amidst the heritage of the webs and weblets.”
Shrugs and blank looks amidst a few chortles responded when he asked: “What did I just say?” Even Peter Bart, the paper’s editor, offered a don’t-look-at-me expression, though he did it with a small measure of histrionics.
A few of the headlines on display at the museum until February are straightforward enough, such as “GREATEST SHOW OFF EARTH” to herald man landing on the moon, or the self-explanatory “REAGAN SWEEPS WHILE CARTER WEEPS.”
Variety began as a weekly Broadway tip sheet (the daily edition began in 1933) and it was written for, about and by people in the business.
As the paper marks it 90th anniversary, Bart conceded that Variety has a problem because as many as a quarter of its readers are outside the United States.
So Variety has eased up on the slang. “We don’t use as much slanguage as we use to,” said Bart, who worked 10 years as a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Still, he doubts they have to tone it down too much because Variety readers constitute “a show-biz family.”
“So people kind of understand - even if they’re overseas,” he said. “It may be arcane. But I think that’s why some people read the paper - to make them feel ‘in.”’
So, to hear Bart talk, slanguage always will have a place in Variety, which he considers “a writer’s paper.” Which means the verbal confections will keep coming.
One relatively recent one Bart cited was “infobahn,” a takeoff of the already hackneyed “information superhighway” and a play on the German word for expressway, “autobahn.”