Part 1 of 2
I still have the copy of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange that I bought back in high school. It’s a Ballantine paperback with a screaming orange cover, retailing for $2.25, and it’s the “American version” of the text – that is, it leaves out the final chapter, which you can find in the British version. It was this American version – ending with the words “I was cured all right” – that served as the basis of Stanley Kubrick’s film.
As should be apparent to everyone who has read even one paragraph of the book, Burgess invented his own dialect for the teenage hoods in his story. He called it “Nadsat,” which derives from the “-teen” termination for the Russian numbers from 11 to 19 (for example, eighteen is “vosemnadtsat”). In other words, it’s “teen talk,” and it’s largely based on Russian.* My Ballantine edition came with a very helpful glossary of all the Nadsat terms used in the text. In effect, I learned my first hundred or so Russian words from this book before I had even commenced formal study of Russian.
Burgess’ achievement in concocting Nadsat has been justly praised. Besides being a brilliant linguistic construct in itself, it plunges you into the world of Alex and his “droogs” (friends) in a visceral and effective manner. Nadsat also serves to demarcate the criminal world of Alex from the sphere of “respectable” society.
Nadsat is the largest part of the linguistic texture of a future world that is close enough to our own to be both plausible and scary. A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, but clues in the text suggest a setting a couple of decades into the future. There are also tantalizing hints that history turned out differently – Alex and his droogs frequent a pub called the Duke of New York, and the Russian linguistic influences, as well as the obvious socialism of the setting, with its enforced employment and “Dignity of Labour” murals, suggest a Sovietized Britain. There are references to a character called “Will the English,” which seems odd in a novel set in England.
Also worthy of note are the elements of the dialect that have nothing to do with Russian. These include mock-Shakespearean locutions (“What, then, didst thou in thy mind have?”), stiff-sounding formal phrases (“it stands to reason”), elaborations of common expressions (“beyond the shadow of a Doubting Thomas”), apparent baby talk (“appy polly loggies” for “apologies”), some instances of Cockney rhyming slang, and the notorious incantatory phrase “O my brothers.”
These elements contribute to the realism of Burgess’ invention, because in-group dialects (slang, argot, cant, whatever they may be called) usually derive their vocabulary from multiple sources. An example is the Argentine slang known as Lunfardo, based mostly on the speech of Italian immigrants, but borrowing from other sources, including French, Gaucho dialect, and Portuguese.
Having said that, like a lot of things in speculative fiction, Nadsat only works if you don’t think about it too much. Its main implausibility is a vocabulary that is too large and contains too many seemingly random elements. Certain terms are used very frequently, but there are others that appear only once or twice in the entire course of the novel and, what’s more, don’t seem to add anything to the overall effect. I’m thinking about such words as “yeckated” (“drove”) and “sloochatted” (“happened”), the sort of boring basic verb that an in-group would tend to overlook, unless it had some special meaning for them.
There are also seldom-used terms that I wish had been used more often. Examples are “zvook” (“sound”), and “choodessny” (“wonderful”), simply because of their attractiveness as sounds. However, they are only used once or twice in the entire book. And Burgess missed an opportunity to use a number of evocative-sounding Russian words to spice things up. I’m thinking of possible terms like “choosh” (from чушь, “drivel, twaddle, rubbish”) and “choot-choot” (from чуть-чуть, “a bit, a tad”). “Stop talking choosh,” “I’m choot-choot fatigued”: potential improvements to Nadsat.
What’s more, no clear explanation is given as to how this teen dialect arose. Alex’s only aesthetic interest is an obsession with classical music (particularly Beethoven); he doesn’t seem like much of a reader – in fact, he likes to destroy books when he gets the chance. Nor is it clearly explained why a group of English teenagers would have been exposed to so much Russian. One character mentions “subliminal penetration,” a phrase with a certain Cold War resonance. It still doesn’t explain why this dialect is limited to disaffected teenagers.
Nadsat isn’t the only strange dialect referred to in the book. Browsing in a record store, Alex meets two young girls who pepper their speech with their own slang, words like “swoony” and “hilly.” Showing an apparent lack of self-awareness, Alex notes that “these young devotchkas had their own like way of govoreeting.” When Alex is sent to prison, he comments on the “old-time real criminal’s slang” of one of the inmates.
At the time I read the novel, I was glad to have the glossary of Nadsat terms. Later, however, I discovered that the inclusion of such a glossary was contrary to the author’s wishes – Burgess wanted his readers to figure out everything from the context. It would have made for a denser, more confusing, but possibly more immersive reading experience. In any case, it’s too late for me to find out. But at least one reader, as I will discuss in the next installment, found Nadsat a bit too dense for his purposes.
*For more information on the origins and structure of Nadsat, this article is helpful.