Jive talk, also known as Harlem jive, the argot of jazz, jazz jargon, vernacular of the jazz world, slang of jazz, and parlance of hip, was the distinctive slang that developed in Harlem, where jive or jazz was played, and was subsequently adopted more widely in US society, peaking in the 1940s. H. L. Mencken, in his The American Language, defined it as "an amalgam of Negro-slang from Harlem and the argots of drug addicts and the pettier sort of criminals, with occasional additions from the Broadway gossip columns and the high school campus".