Shamus (film) Shamus (film) Shamus is a 1973 American comedy thriller film directed by Buzz Kulik, and starring Burt Reynolds and Dyan Cannon. New York private detective Shamus McCoy is called to the house of Hume, an eccentric diamond dealer, and is given the task of recovering some stolen diamonds. His investigation is thwarted at every turn and it is only when he is beaten by a gang of thugs to warn him off the job that he realizes that he's onto something really big. Using his friend Springy as well as Alexis Montaigne, the sister of a nightclub owner, McCoy digs
Slang legal setting, as both are arenas in which standard language is considered necessary and/or whether the term has been entered in the Oxford English Dictionary, which some scholars claim changes its status as slang. It is often difficult to collect etymologies for slang terms, largely because slang is a phenomenon of speech, rather than written language and etymologies which are typically traced via corpus. Eric Partridge, cited as the first to report on the phenomenon of slang in a systematic and linguistic way, postulated that a term would likely be in circulation for a decade before it would be written