STREET TALK: How to Speak and Understand...

STREET TALK: How to Speak and Understand American Slang by David Burke (Optima Press: $14.95, illustrated). Readers familiar with Burke’s entertaining and invaluable volumes on “Street French” and “Street Spanish” will find his newest book vivid and enlightening: Native speakers seldom realize how many colloquialisms occur in films, television shows and radio programs, as well as in daily conversation. The unremarkable sentence “Get a B. L .T. and an O. J. for the V. P. A. S. A. P., O. K.?” would be incomprehensible to anyone who learned formal English in language classes. Burke’s program of dialogues, quizzes and glossaries offer foreigners an excellent introduction to common, non-standard usage. The phonetic versions of the dialogues stress the way Americans drop final consonants, slur vowels and dentalize D’s and T’s to form a single sound. Burke is already at work on a companion volume devoted to popular American obscenities and insults. Check it out.