Savvy, cats?

For some post-semester reading I checked Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep out of the library and found this little gem in the beginning:

We talked a lot about the campy overuse of "baby" in works like Double Indemnity, but the heavy slang really works to create an atmosphere of exclusion, separating outsiders from insiders. I think that works well with the claustrophobia that seems to come with a lot of noir stuff -- that narrow, inescapable hidden crime world with its own lingo and behaviors. Like, unless you can use "shatting on her uppers" in a sentence, you can't be in the hard-boiled club.

Here's a much longer list of "gangster slang" in case anyone was interested: http://sginc31.narod.ru/humor/slang.htm