SOURCE: "Nadsat: The Argot and Its Implications in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange," in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 1, No. 3, March, 1971, pp. 406-10.

Evans is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, he discusses the use of the "nadsat" slang in A Clockwork Orange, and its effect upon the novel as a dystopian vision.

The dustjacket of the Heinemann edition of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) promises that "it will take the reader no more than fifteen pages to master and revel in the expressive language of Nadsat." Perhaps that is what it will take to guess most of the meanings from context, but to master the argot of the teenage set with which the novel deals may be somewhat more difficult. It is indeed something like learning Russian vocabulary without the grammar. There are about a dozen words on every page of the novel that...