Echoes of Homicide in Night
Train
from the Amis
Discussion Board (thanks to Celestina Groeberhorst).
posted Thursday, December 09, 1999 07:33 p.m.
FROM *NIGHT TRAIN*: "I am a
police. That may sound like an unusual statement---or an unusual construction.
But it's a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a
policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am
a police."
FROM *WHYDUNIT* BY CHRIS WRIGHT: There has been much speculation as to the
authenticity of Amis's cop talk here, the use of "a police" causing
the most consternation. One reviewer quoted a New York City police officer as
saying, "Whoa! This writer should change his name back to Amos and start
making those famous cookies again!" John Updike himself weighed in, calling
" 'I am a police'...the first of a number of American locutions new to this
native speaker."
"There's nothing strange about it", Amis says, bristling slightly.
"I got a lot of my stuff from David Simon's book *Homicide*. His city is
Baltimore, and that's what they say there, and I'll bet they say it in a few
other cities, too."
FROM *HOMICIDE* BY DAVID SIMON: "Yes, he is a bear, but the best part of
working with Donald Worden is easily understood: The man is a natural
police." [Page 28.]
FROM *HOMICIDE* BY DAVID SIMON: "This city is fucked up and it will always
be fucked up, but that isn't normal. Fuck Baltimore. Gene was a police in
America who got shot and there are places where he would get treated like a war
hero." [Page 297.]
FROM *HOMICIDE* BY DAVID SIMON: "How long have I been a poh-leece?"
asks Worden, giving it the full Hampden drawl. [Page 565.]
FROM *THE MOTHER TONGUE* BY BILL BRYSON: "This tendency to compress and
mangle words was first formally noted in a 1949 *New Yorker* article by one John
Davenport, who gave it the happy name of Slurvian. In American English, Slurvian
perhaps reaches its pinnacle in Baltimore, a city whose citizens have long had a
particular gift for chewing up the most important vowels, consonants, and even
syllables of most words and converting them into a kind of verbal compost, to
put it in the most charitable terms possible. In Baltimore (pronounced Balamer),
an eagle is an 'iggle', a tiger is a 'tagger', water is 'wooder', a power mower
is a 'paramour', a store is a 'stewer', clothes are 'clays', orange juice is 'arnjoos',
a bureau is a 'beero', and the Orals [Orioles] are of course the local baseball
team. Whole glossaries have been composed to help outsiders interpret these and
the many hundreds of other terms that in Baltimore pass for English."
