'Hash-House Greek', 'Skee Talk', 'The Pleasure Hound', 'Buttinsky', 'Shyster', 'Gold Digger' – 'the blab of the pave' as Walt Whitman called it; a long trawl through the language of the island and boroughs of New York beginning with the early nineteenth century when spielers danced on the sidewalks to the music of the hurdy-gurdy men, butter-and-egg men dined in lobster palaces while hooligans and hookers from the sticks slummed it in dives and greasy spoons – vocabulary that rose from the city streets often interplaying with vaudeville, radio, movies, comics, and the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley; a provocative cultural history of a developing metropolis with stories that rarely make their way into conventional history books.
