"The Hipcrime Vocab," the captain said.

"Put him under arrest, sergeant - possession of

subversive literature."

selections from The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan

See John Brunner, STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968)

DITTO Use it! The mental process involved is exactly analogous to the bandwidth-
saving technique employed for your phone. If you've seen the scene you've seen the scene
and there's too much new information for you to waste time looking it over more than
once. Use "ditto". Use it!

IMPOSSIBLE Means: 1 I wouldn't like it and when it happens I won't approve; 2 I can't
be bothered; 3 God can't be bothered. Meaning 3 may perhaps be valid but the others are
101% whaledreck.

RUMOUR Believe all you hear. Your world may not be a better one than the one the
blocks live in but it'll be a sight more vivid.

HIPCRIME You committed one when you Opened this book. Keep it up. It's our only
hope.

COINCIDENCE You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on.

HUMAN BEING You're one. At least, if you aren't, you know you're a Martian or a
trained dolphin or Shalmaneser.
(If you want me to tell you more than that, you're out of luck. There's nothing more
anybody can tell you.

NEGRO Member of a subgroup of the humanrace who hails, or whose ancestors hailed,
from a chunk of land nicknamed - not by its residents - Africa. Superior to the Caucasian
in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas,
the concentration-camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

PATRIOTISM A great British writer once said that if he had to choose between betraying
his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would have the decency to betray his
country. (Amen, brothers and sisters! Amen!)

HISTORY Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from
history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel
must have been taking the long view.

ART A Friend of mine in Tulsa, Okla., whenI was about eleven years old. I'd be
interested to hear from him. There are so many pseudos around taking his name in vain.

LEADERSHIP A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive

imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it'll be someone else's
bones which go crack and not their own.

SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt
to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a
thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a
thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.

UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat
them out of and didn't manage. See also DISHONESTY,SNEAKY, UNDERHAND and
JUST LUCKY I GUESS.

POPULATION EXPLOSION Unique in human experience, an event which happened

yesterday but which everyone swears won't happen until tomorrow.

LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from
examining the two following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be
true and often by the same people: "I can't so you mustn't," and "I can but you mustn't."