Word: barf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There are times when you feel that if you hear the words elitist or subvert just once more, you'll barf. So when MOMA's Margit Rowell, who in the past has curated some intelligent shows on Constructivist sculpture, Brancusi, Antonin Artaud's drawings and other topics, affirms that Polke's vernacular has "regenerate[d] the language and meaning of Western artistic experience," and suggests that he is the Hieronymus Bosch of our day, you sigh. Polke has never shown a smidgen of the aesthetic intensity, the absorption in religious and moral experience or the staggering completeness of Bosch...
...picture changed onscreen whenever I moved my head. Swinging to the left, I could peer out a window and see the Atlanta skyline; looking up, I saw overhead bins; straight ahead was my pull-down tray and a row of empty seats. Sure, some essential details were missing--barf bags, crying babies, passengers jabbing me with their elbows--but that was O.K. It would have taken a lot more than that to fool me into thinking I was really flying...
...former used-car salesman from Philadelphia had a hook. Born of the theater-of-the-absurd atmosphere of the late 1960s, est (Latin for "it is") promised to help people get "it," whatever "it" was. Erhard's 60-hour seminars were strenuous ordeals, complete with "body catchers" and barf bags for the weak of mind and stomach. Trainers applauded bladder control and cursed those who didn't get it. Still, Erhard and his message proved popular, even winning celebrity advocates. Then, after two decades and two divorces, the self-help messiah vanished amid reports of tax fraud (which proved false...
...sample of the wide variety of nicknames his roommates have created for him: Well, the ones that rhyme with my last name are: Jetlag, Barf-bag, Old Hag, Zig Zag (a roommate walks in, saying: "What's up, Leftbag?"), Saddlebag, Teabag, Trashbag... and of course the ones that rhyme with my first name: Odd, Sod, Mossad, Facade, and Re-todd. That's just about all we can probably print, and I have no idea what "Leftbag" means...
...garbonzo ever since. In the U.S. alone, thousands of vivid new words -- from the rude to the crude to the lewd -- have slipped into (some would say assaulted) the language. Most of the new vocabulary has come fromdiscrete groups for whom a special jargon affords status and protection: students (barf), blacks (jazz, originally to copulate), the military (blow it out your barracks bag), alcohol user (crocked), drug user (crackhead) and the underworld (grifter...