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the Old Soak drinks far too much now, at least he doesn’t drink as much as one of Scott Fitzgerald’s heroines. By 1922 a flotilla of boats, known as “Rum Row,” was anchored three miles off Long Island Sound, safely in international waters, with holds full of liquor brought up from the West Indies. Under cover of night, bootleggers would chug out in motorboats and make their purchases from what was effectively a floating liquor store. Some men wait for their ships to come in, it was said—and others meet them beyond the three-mile limit.
    Looking back from deep within the Depression, Fitzgerald remembered “a gala in the air.” Life was a “gay parade,” a carnival of bright colors, lavish and exuberant. Around the same time, he jotted a recollection in his notebooks: “Laughed with a sudden memory of Hopkins where going to a party he had once tried taking gin by rectum, and the great success it had been until the agony of passing great masses of burned intestine.”
    On this side of paradise, sins needed to feel original. That autumn a girl attracted crowds in Manhattan by strolling along Fifth Avenue in transparent pajamas, walking four cats on leads. The cats were also wearing pajamas. A crowd gathered; the police were called. Eventually an observant policeman worked out that the girl was enacting a current bit of slang,putting on a show of “the cat’s pajamas.” The police dismissed it as an example of that unsettling new phenomenon, a “publicity scheme,” and made the girl go home.
    There was no sign of someone trying to be “the cat’s meow” or “the bee’s knees,” other popular superlatives of the decade. In early February, Fitzgerald noted the “adjectives of the year—‘hectic,’ ‘marvelous,’ and ‘slick.’” Zelda later offered her owncurrent adjectives from those years: hectic, delirious, killing. “And how!” exclaimed the young men, as they announced they were becoming slaves to highballs; young women advised each other of “the new and really swagger things” to do in the city. “It was slick to have seen you,” Fitzgerald told Max Perkins that autumn, while Zelda wrote a magazine editor, “Thank you again for the slick party,” apologizing for her behavior at it: “But you know how it is to be a drinking woman!”
    In 1921 H. L. Mencken published a revised version of his groundbreaking
American Language
, with a whole section devoted to slang and a separate chapter for war slang, including words like “slacker,” which originally meant draft dodger. In 1925 Virginia Woolf would remark in her essay “American Fiction”: “The Americans are doing what the Elizabethans did—they are coining new words. They are instinctively making the language adapt itself to their needs . . . Nor does it need much foresight to predict that when words are being made, a literature will be made out of them.”
    A list of the words first recorded in English between 1918 and 1923 reads like a JazzAge divination of the century to come, a catalog of the origins of our life:
    cool (1918)
    motherfucker (1918)
    teenage (1921)
    wimp (1920)
    debunk (1923)
    encode (1919)
    hypermodern (1923)
    multi-purpose (1920)
    power play (1921)
    existentialism (1919)
    columnist (1920)
    cartwheel (1920)
    extrovert (1918)
    fantasist (1923)
    Fascist (1921)
    publicized (1920)
    mass media (1923)
    feedback (1920)
    slenderize (1923)
    slinky (1921)
    sadomasochistic (1921)
    homosexually (1921)
    post-feminist (1919)
    biracial (1921)
    racialized (1921)
    race-baiter (1921)
    to ace (1923)
    French kiss (1923)
    fucked-off (1923)
    psyching (1920)
    tear-jerker (1921)
    fundamentalism (1923)
    bagel (1919)
    ad lib (1919)
    mock-up (1920)
    prefabricated (1921)
    atom bomb (1921)
    supersonic (1919)
    ultrasonic (1923)
    hitch-hike (1923)
    comfort zone (1923)
    junkie