Jim Crotty's new book, How to Talk American, probably has more travel hours logged in research than any language book on the market. A collection of slang and jargon, as well as observations on the source of the verbal variants, the book is a product of one of the past decade's most mobile individuals.
Starting in spring 1986, Crotty's Monk magazine was one of the brightest stars of a rising constellation of DIY publishing, epitomizing the desktop-publishing revolution. Crotty and his partner, Michael Lane, free from the chains of an office, rode their big, pink mobile home around the country, documenting all the hipsters and weirdness they found, publishing their exploits in the semi-regular, surprisingly glossy magazine. The premiere issue was published using the first version of Pagemaker on a 512K Mac.
Along the whole strange trip, Crotty kept an ear for the slang that locals slung, often covering found linguistic oddities in Monk. The book, published by Houghton Mifflin's Mariner Books, highlights most of the country's geographical areas, as well as plenty of subcultures whose richness has convinced Crotty of the individuality of the country's verbal strains.
Although we've become the world power, and our culture has spread across the planet, Crotty believes "there's still a lingering insecurity in even the wealthiest Americans about their language. We really believe we don't speak English properly, and we hire the English to be our butlers, receptionists, and magazine editors."
The concern is unnecessary, Crotty says, adding that Americans shouldn't even bother calling what they speak the same language as that of mother England.
"We do speak English at the root, but really, we speak something different," Crotty says. "America is constantly reinventing itself, and the language is constantly reinventing itself. So you have this continuous creation of new subcultures of language. You have this churning."
Crotty traces his appreciation for slang back to his own roots in the "slang-free" Midwest, which he says is like growing up in touch with the Buddhist bottom-line of emptiness, after which everything is interesting.
Following the Buddhist idea of suspending judgment, Crotty tries to enter the world of subcultures with a clear mind, participating fully. "I've thrown out the idea of looking for alternative, looking for weird - what the hell is that?" he asks. "You have to throw out likes and dislikes, go in, and see what's going on."
Betraying a religious fervor, Crotty quickly carries the principal to a macro-scale: "All's fair in culture and war at this point. Let's drop all these artificial divisions that we had to have. I see the next century as world culture. Drop your stupid identities of who you think you are, and find out who you really are."
Since April, Crotty, now 38, has been living in Los Angeles, enjoying the peace of having a place to call home. Living on the road, he notes, is a quick path to insanity.
Never at rest, even with a new rootedness, the duo of Crotty and Lane continue to publish and explore. A New York issue of Monk is due in November, along with a new travel book series for Simon & Schuster that's also in the works. The first title, Monk's Guide to California, is set for release in early 1999. A CD-ROM was initially to be released by Voyager but, after problems there, will soon be released by the monks themselves. Crotty has shed most illusions of making millions on the path he's chosen. "Take it from me," he writes in the book's entry for DIY, "if you go into DIY publishing, you're going to lose money."
The problem of money for Crotty is of less concern than the draw of other cultures and following his intuitions of new ways of doing things, as he's done with desktop publishing.
"The idea was to create, as Robert Fripp would put it, a mobile intelligence unit - roam the planet, have your communications tools with you at all times, and basically be a digital nomad. We pioneered dashboard publishing," Crotty said.
