abstract:Back slang is an English coded language in which the written word is spoken phonemically backwards. It is thought to have originated in Victorian England, being used mainly by market sellers, such as butchers and greengrocers, to have private conversations behind their customers' backs and pass off lower quality goods to less observant customers.
Half a year later, Silverman struck back in an Esquire article, calling McPherson a "D-girl, " industry slang for an attractive, but powerless, junior female executive.
Sooner or later somebody, usually Charlie, gets around to saying or doing something embarrassingly pretentious, and all at once you remember the alchemic creativity with which the Odets of the 1930s turned working-class slang into poetry, and sigh at the thought of what the American stage lost when he turned his back on the world of "Golden Boy" and "Awake and Sing!"