What with the passing of Edd “Kookie” Byrnes from tv’s 77 Sunset Strip, I went in search of a precious artifact that changed my view of language at an impressionable age. Kookie’s lingo in the brochure was an offshoot of Beat language and later led to more explorations of ‘cool’ vocabulary. Incidentally, only one copy of this exists/existed on the Internet and I found it in my hometown of Winnipeg.
Tom Dalzell’s reference book is a classic language study which morphed out of the Kookie search. His labor of love is a cornucopia of hip vocab going back to the 1850s! A must-have from Amazon for anyone seriously interested in the “Cool” or in (changing) language.