You enter, while studying [the Historical Dictonary of American Slang], the west wing of verbal consciousness—the realm of slangfarbennmelodie," of alliterative near-similarity and drunken lateralism and chiming hostility purged of its face-to-face context and abstracted into music: you are in the presence, at times, of the only good things that a million anonymous bullies and sadistic drill-sergeants and cruel-minded, mean-spirited frat boys or sorority girls have bequeathed to the world.
—Nicholson Baker, "Leading with the Grumper," in The Size of Thoughts