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...headline is unintelligible, but to those familiar with Variety it is announcing that the movie Return of the King beat out Master and Commander with eleven Academy Award nominations. Another example is the opening line of an article that appears in the 11 February 2004 issue, "A hefty writedown at Blockbuster knocked Viacom into the red last quarter despite a strong perf at those true-blue cable nets and strides at Paramount, where prexy Mel Karmazin praised the 2004 pic slate." Variety employs a number of grammatical tricks and jargon terms, which it dubs "slanguage," to achieve its distinctive style.
This style achieves two main objectives. Like all jargon, it creates the sense of an "in crowd." It seeks to exclude those outside the industry and puff up the Texas-sized egos of those in Hollywood. It also enlivens up what could be a rather dull subject. Sure Hollywood is all about celebrity and glamour, but Variety is not. Variety is a business paper, concerned with contracts and deals, profit and loss. The inventive use of language spices up the subject matter and combines the tone of a gossip column with the subject of a business journal.
Variety began publication in 1905, founded by Simon J. "Sime" Silverman, a gambler and general ne'er-do-well, with a $2,500 loan from his father. Silverman went into the news business with the motto, "bury the putt and give me the fact."
Silverman may have eschewed "puff," but from the beginning Variety used a distinctive, slangy style. In 1933, the paper became a daily and changed its name to Daily Variety. On 17 July 1935, the paper published the most famous instance of its slanguage, "Sticks Nix Hick Pix," a headline for an article about rural audiences rejecting a film about rural life.
The largest element in Variety's style is the jargon or slang that it employs. The paper deploys a bewildering array of jargon terms without explanation or aid to the neophyte reader.
The inventive nature of Variety's slang is well documented. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, includes some twenty-odd entries whose initial citations are from the magazine. These include: boffo (12 May 1943); fave, a clipping of favorite (16 Mar 1938); featurette (28 Jan 1942); Grammy, the musical award (30 Sep 1959); juve, a youth (17 Apr 1935); kitchenette (7 May 1910); nabe, a clipping of neighborhood (14 Feb 1933); nance, an effeminate or gay man (6 Aug 1910); nite (13 Jan 1928); payola (19 Oct 1938); pix (19 Jul 1932); punch line (25 Nov 1921); shim, a blend of she and him, meaning a transvestite or transsexual (19 Feb 1975); shoot-'em-up (11 Feb 1953); small time (30 Apr 1910); strip and tease (1 Oct 1930), strip teaser (26 Nov 1930), and strip tease (2 Dec 1936); the use of wow as a verb (24 Dec 1924); and, quite aptly, show biz (13 Jun 1945).
But Variety's slanguage goes well beyond these terms that have made their way into the general vocabulary of the nation. Daily, it uses arcane jargon terms both from the entertainment industry and unique to the paper itself. The meanings of some of these terms are often not immediately obvious to the casual reader. One such is the verb to ankle to mean to quit or leave; "a successful guest-hosting stint on Jack Benny's radio show led to an offer to host The Tonight Show...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Verbatim
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