Word: aha
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...says--just follow him. We rumble behind him and his bike at 15 m.p.h., the streets full of onlookers watching our parade--left turn, right, left, left, right, left, 10 minutes and there we are, back on the main road. He points ahead, toward the on-ramp. Aha...
...African-American dancers saunter onto stage wearing black (get it! get it!) and start to boogie--and I mean exaggerated, highly offensive, stereotypical "boogie-ing"--to the generic beats of a sunglasses-wearing saxophone player. A second later, a group of beautiful blond Irish dancers all wearing white (aha!) enter stage left to start a little friendly competition with these upstarts. It's embarrassing. But the audience ate it up. Even more embarrassing...
Then a jump cut to a second screen-filling face, this one wearing, barely perceptible right up there at the top of your picture, something shiny on its head. Aha! you think, that could be a batting helmet, and ergo this new face could belong to the player at the plate who, since he's inclining his head over his invisible right shoulder, may be a left-handed hitter...
...blame for the surge in margin debt? Aha. Some responsibility goes to Federal Reserve boss Alan Greenspan, who complained as far back as 1996 about the market's "irrational exuberance." Yet it is within his purview to raise margin requirements above the current 50%. However, that might tick off Wall Street, which earns more than 8% interest on margin loans. (Brokers are free to raise requirements on their own, and some have.) No Fed chairman since 1974 has moved to lift the limit. Individual investors--and not just day traders--also share part of the blame. Intoxicated...
...Aha!" was the gleeful exclamation of 65-year-old Desiree, a recent immigrant from Haiti, when she finally comprehended the term. Native English speakers take the words "broom," "sweep," "dishes" and "hammer" for granted. These brand new vocabulary words and phrases will be of critical importance to newly arrived low-income Americans, as they struggle to understand help-wanted advertisements, American shopping malls and even soap operas...