Who gives a sh*t anyway?

[Dave Monroe]

>From Steven C. Weisenburger, A Gravity's Rainbow
Companion, 2nd ed. (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006),
"And More Acknowledgments (2006)," pp. ix-xii ...

Some yeas ago I heard from Professor Brett Scott
Rogers of the University of Missouri History
Department about a find he made.  While working
through an archive at the Western Historical
Manuscript Collection, the Peter C. Tamony papers, he
came across a February 4, 1966, letter from Pynchon to
Tamony inquiring whether there was any better
dictionary of American slang for the period 1876-1888
than the Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner
Dictionary of American Slang, a standard reference. 
He'd found that it didn't "give a clear notion of who
used what words under what circusmtances."  Pynchon
understood very well how context matters greatly.  Did
he, Tamony, know of a better better resource? Then
Pynchon puzzled out loud:

I ask myself, who gives a shit anyway?  What's the
point of being historically accurate, nobody's going
to notice one way or another.  A sticky question, one
I've puzzled for a long time, how much you have a
right to make up out of your own head.

My experinece: they notice, man!  They really do
notice! ... (p. xii)


 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.
http://new.mail.yahoo.com