Nadsat is the sticky creative juice that fuels A Clockwork Orange's cult status. Sixty years on from its publication (and more than a half-century after Stanley Kubrick's infamous film adaptation), the book's lingo has peppered pop culture, across music (band names like Moloko, Campag Velocet and Heaven 17 song titles by musicians including New Order and Lana Del Rey concept albums such as Brazilian metallers Sepultura's A-Lex, 2009 lyrics including David Bowie's Girl Loves Me, from his final album Blackstar, 2016) art (a new major UK exhibition is entitled The Horror Show!) and nightlife (from legendary Ibiza club Clockwork Orange, to NADSAT: a 2021 compilation of young LGBTQ musicians from Paris). The word "Nadsat" derives from a Russian suffix meaning "teen", and the language of A Clockwork Orange is a vivid blitz of English and Russian words ("horrorshow" stems from the Russian term khorosho, meaning "good") with varied additives: Elizabethan flourishes ("thou" "thee and thine" "verily") Arabic German nursery rhyming. Fifteen-year-old Alex, the tale's ultraviolent anti-hero and "humble narrator", addresses us in the flip horrorshow slovos – that is, crazy, brilliant words – of Nadsat: a youth slang concocted by the polyglot author. Within the first few lines of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, we are lured into a near-future after-dark realm, and a strangely potent new language.
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