Frank Kogan

Yeah, I just was emailing my brother and saying that I'd failed to address the question "whose radar?" I'll post our interchange. But I think the crucial answer, in regard to this column, is "the radar of someone fairly distant from the phenomenon," meaning that something's more likely to be on a distant person's radar than the equivalent thing would have twenty or fifty or two hundred years ago.

An interesting question then would be do people now come up with ever more ingenious ways of keeping outsiders out. At least sometimes one of the purposes of lingo and jargon and slang is to remain unintelligible, e.g., criminal slang. If any teacher or cop can google a drug term and find out what it means (I don't know if this is true), how do dealers react?