“The Hamptons Dictionary”
Miles Jaffe
Review by Baylis Greene
 Dana Shaw
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(06/12/2007) Miles Jaffe’s “The Hamptons Dictionary” begins with a bang and doesn’t stop going off. “A-list,” a favored term of the celebrity-hound glossies, is its first entry. It is defined as “A catalog of a___,” the elided word there of course being a reference to the body’s second most useful orifice.
What follows are 170 pages of explicated coinages, expressions, acronyms, and slurs, all the product of a life spent on the South Fork, where naturally any resident can and frequently will attest to a dismaying increase in rudeness, crudeness, ostentation, and despoliation in recent years.
Many of the entries are enthusiastically foul-mouthed. Someone who enjoys imparting his hostility through the superior height and bulk of a pricey Cadillac Escalade, for instance, drives an F.U.V., a “F___ You Vehicle.” Other words get only halfway there: A “clocksucker” “drags out a job or project in order to drive up the cost”; a “trashole” drops his “weekend garbage” in a public can. And who among us doesn’t know a “SPRICK,” or spoiled rich kid?
Most terms are geographically specific. Among the 24 of them with a Hamptons derivation, “Hampton serenade” is “the continuous and often overwhelming cacophony of gasoline powered hedge trimmers, lawn mowers, and leaf blowers.”
The book is inspired as much by “The Devil’s Dictionary,” Ambrose Bierce’s great work of wit and misanthropy, from 1911, as it is by the interpersonal horrors witnessed by Mr. Jaffe, a born contrarian who can’t hide his disgust. The man who brought us the Nuke the Hamptons Web site, a good joke that ran up against some bad history on Sept. 11, 2001, has clearly kept a tally of slights and outrages. (In his acknowledgements, Mr. Jaffe even thanks, in his way, the “sad guy” he saw screaming obscenities into a cellphone in front of his own stroller-bound kid on Job’s Lane in Southampton.)
The result is this explosion of revenge-minded ridicule, which provides a satisfaction only slightly dampened by the knowledge of how seldom targets of satire recognize they’re the mark.
“The Hamptons Dictionary” comes with Mad magazine-style illustrations by Jennett Russell of The Southampton Press. Its cover is as black as any bile that flows within it, and the book is perfectly sized to fit atop most standard toilet tanks.
You might want to be in the privacy of your own john when and if you find yourself laughing at the more offensive passages. For example: “yardie, n. 1. A landscape laborer, often an illegal immigrant. See ‘four footer.’ ” In the author’s defense, he is also a compiler, and who knows what employer might have coined those terms, or where Mr. Jaffe heard them. In fact, the book contains a long list of contributors, and words can be submitted over the Internet.
One of the interesting things here is that you won’t find any references to WASPs or Jews. Mr. Jaffe is too astute to believe that “folks is folks” and age-old culture doesn’t matter; what this is about is money. The more of it you accumulate, regardless of your background, the more suited you become to that, uh, A-list.
 Jennett Russell
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The book’s subtitle, instructively, is “The Essential Guide to Class Warfare.” But Mr. Jaffe wages it on both sides of the divide. Consider: “Bonacker, n. 1. An often inbred native of East Hampton who can trace their local lineage back at least three generations. 2. One who was born on a kitchen table in Springs. 3. A hillbilly.” Or a couple of the subordinate definitions of “local”: “7. A rude, uneducated person. 8. A moron.”
Much of the book, it should be noted, isn’t angry at all. To take the trouble to name something “barkscaping” and then describe it as “excessive use of wood mulch” is simply sweet. And the lament behind the definition of hamlet is withering: “A small community, like a village, except without its own municipal government and therefore destined for tragedy. E.g., Water Mill.”
Is there nostalgia behind those words? Nostalgia takes its lumps, as sentiments go, for being facile and unrealistic, but sometimes it’s warranted. Take the 1970s. In Mr. Jaffe’s case, his father, the architect Norman Jaffe, was here, suffering the rich, sure, but also working at making the place look better. Now giant, tasteless houses proliferate. Economically, there really was a time when, say, a postmaster could afford to live in the heart of Sag Harbor.
There’s no going back. But what’s ahead?
Here’s a worry: In 1913 Ambrose Bierce took his misanthropy across the border into Mexico and was never heard from again. Today the world is a far different place. Smaller, too. Where’s Mr. Jaffe going to go?
“The Hamptons
Dictionary”
Miles Jaffe
Complete Fabrications, $19.95
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Miles Jaffe is an artist and designer who lives in Bridgehampton.