Your Breath Smells So Bad People on the Phone Hang Up.

Snaps, by James Percelay, Monteria Ivey, and Stephan Dweck (William Morrow).

Your sister is so ugly, she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. You're so fat, your belt size is "equator." You're so short, you have to cuff your underwear.

Wait, it's only a game—a mock battle of tongues known as playing the dozens. Among many African-Americans you'll hear the game called capping, cracking, bagging, dissing, hiking, joning, ranking, ribbing, serving, signifying, slipping, sounding, and snapping. Now there is a guide by three self-appointed Charles Gorens of the dozens—including two Dartmouth grads, Monteria Ivey '82 and Stephan Dweck'82. Ivey hosts Black Entertainment Television's Uptown Comedy Club, and Dweck is an entertainment lawyer. Along with TV producer Percelay they form an en- tertainment company called 2 Bros and a White Guy (Ivey and Dweck are the Bros). Their book contains more than 450 insults gathered from 100 AfricanAmericans over a year's research. Entertainers like Melvin Van Peebles, Dr. Dre, and Russell Simmons contributed.

For the uninitiated, the book traces the game way back. Slaves who were judged the weakest in body and mind were sold in groups of 12.To be sold with"the dozens" was "the only thing more degrading than slavery," according to Quincy Jones, who wrote the foreward. Hence the name. But Jones says the game itself goes even farther back, to the African griots who would compose unflattering songs about villagers who broke the rules.

Winning at the dozens requires an audience, and the authors give some tips for gaining its sympathysuch as eyeing people in the crowd, who will laugh at your snaps for fear of becoming the next target.

Some of the funniest insults in the book are unprintable in, say, an alumni magazine. "Disgusting," concludes the Reverend Calvin Butts, a Harlem minister who heads up the movement against gangsta rap. Monteria Ivey responds that fighting with one's wit beats fighting with guns. "The dozens is a thinking person's game," conclude the Ivy League graduates in their book.

So you'd better not play it yourself. You're so stupid, on the job application where it said "sign here" you wrote "Aquarius."