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Published on: 4/16/2008
Last Visited: 4/16/2008
Lady Snark is the creation of A.C. Kemp, a native of Jackson, Mich. Since her days there waitressing , "which," she said, "might have been my first exposure to really rude people" , Kemp has moved to Boston and developed a career as a linguist with a specialty in slang.She is a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she primarily teaches English to foreign graduate students.
After working in film production and software development, Kemp went back to school for a degree in applied linguistics.That's how she found herself teaching an adult education class on slang for non-native English speakers.
"I had all these students who wanted to learn slang so they could fit in with their co-workers," she said.
She started a Web site, but soon realized her students weren't the only ones using it.
"People would send me weird questions about rap music or slang from the 1900s," she said."I hadn't been someone who had this real academic interest in slang.I wasn't spending my time reading these Victorian comic books to see what obscure words people were using 100 years ago, but people wrote to me as if I were some sort of authority."
Kemp originally set out to write a slang book for foreign students, but there was little interest from publishers.Gradually the idea morphed into "The Perfect Insult."
Her agent recommended writing from the perspective of a character, and Lady Snark was born. (She has her own web site, ladysnark.com.)
"I read all these books (on eccentric socialites) and came up with this character from all the strangest ones I could find in those books," Kemp said.
The book is dedicated to Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrborn, a historical figure who moved to the Galapagos Islands with two male companions and declared herself empress.She was usually seen brandishing a pistol.
"You can't make up characters like that," Kemp said.
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