Mametspeak: the noun denotes David Mamet's signature style; rapid, rhythmic, profane yet poetic patter of streetwise raconteurs who inhabit many of his works.
Besides the noun, he's got his own adjective, Mametesque: It's used to describe other writers' dialogue resembling the roundabout, lyrical yet menacing speech in such Mamet plays and films as "Glengarry Glen Ross," "American Buffalo," "House of Games" and "Homicide."
It might vex some writers to see their styles pigeonholed behind their own names. Mamet takes it as an honor.
"It makes me feel great," Mamet, 53, said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where his new movie "Heist" played in September. "It's a really great compliment to be a part of the language.
"Somebody said to me, 'Jeez, I'd like to write like you.' I said, 'I have to write like me, but you don't.' It's like the old joke where the guy comes back from a business trip a day early, and there's his partner making love to his wife. And he says, 'Sam, I have to. But you?'
"I have to write like me. I make an effort to write in all different sorts of styles, but I'm largely thought of writing in this sort of faux poetic vernacular. So be it."
Though best known for creating tough-talking wiseguys in crime tales, Mamet has taken many literary approaches on stage and screen. "Oleanna" is a provocative play about a student's sex-harassment charges against a professor, a work Mamet also directed on film.
"Sexual Perversity in Chicago" deals with contemporary sex lives and was adapted for film under the title "About Last Night ..." "Boston Marriage" is a period piece about two acid-tongued, Victorian-era lesbians.
The film "Vanya on 42nd Street" was based on Mamet's adaptation of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya." Two years ago, Mamet directed a film version of Terence Rattigan's "The Winslow Boy," a play set in 1910 England about a father battling his son's expulsion from school on a theft charge.
Mamet has aimed two broadsides at Hollywood: The scathing satire "Speed-the-Plow" on stage and last year's film "State and Main," an homage to the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges.
"Which of us doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds us? We all do," said Mamet, who has stepped up his production as director to nearly a movie a year starting with "The Spanish Prisoner" in 1998. "It's a silly industry, sure. The older I get, it occurs to me that probably all industries are the same. Of course, it's silly. They're all silly industries, aren't they?"
Mamet grew up on movies and television and was a bit of a child actor, appearing in local TV shows for the Chicago Board of Rabbis, where his uncle headed radio and television production.
He later gravitated toward community theater, but realizing he did not have the acting chops, he turned toward writing.
"I always made up stories," Mamet said. "My mother always used to say, 'David, why must you dramatize?'"
Growing up, Mamet spent his time reading at the library and hanging out on the streets listening to working-class Chicago types-- "the 'dese, dem, does' kind of guys," he said. Their dialogue percolated and began manifesting itself in "American Buffalo" and other 1970s plays he wrote after graduating from Godard College in Vermont.
Quickly established as a leading American playwright, Mamet won the Pulitzer in 1984 for "Glengarry Glen Ross."
He moved into screenplays with "The Postman Always Rings Twice." Other solo or shared screenwriting credits include "The Verdict," "The Untouchables," "Hannibal" and "Wag the Dog."
Mamet began directing films in the late 1980s, frequently casting longtime friends and theater buddies, among them William H. Macy, Joe Mantegna, Felicity Huffman and Ricky Jay. Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, has co-starred in his recent films, including "Heist," which stars Gene Hackman and Danny DeVito.
After "Winslow Boy" and "State and Main," "Heist" is a return to the seedy crime world of earlier Mamet works. Hackman heads a team of crooks who stop a plane on the runway to filch a gold shipment.
"Heist" piles on shell-game twists in which the thieves betray one another and the audience is continually misdirected on the whereabouts of the gold.
"I've always liked David's writing," Hackman said. "How he can create a character like mine where you never quite knew who he was. The idea that he's a bit of a mystery, with a nice switch at the end. That kind of writing is something really very special."
Mamet calls his fixation with crime stories a simple conceit, an escapist setting of "once upon a time in this criminal element, which isn't you and me. Don't worry. It's not about us, it's about those other people."
"It fascinates all of us," Mamet said. "I think 'Godfather' (is) the best American movie. Crime fascinates us all because, you know, it's a violent world out there."
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