Word: biz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Liberty Weekend, some carped, was more about profits than patriotism, more about commerce than comity. The opening-night ceremony was a sentimentalized show-biz tribute that left no cliche unturned, a hokey combination of the old Jackie Gleason show from Miami Beach, the Rose Bowl parade and the Ziegfeld Follies. But what, after all, could be more American than that? Show biz, not solemnity, is an American hallmark; taste is not guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. President Reagan's aides were concerned that their man would be demeaned by the Busby Berkeley choreography. Others joked about his pressing...
...show biz. Words such as network, rock, video, new wave, hit parade, album all turn up in Swedish or, for that matter, Arabic. Show biz helps introduce the language of romance: sexy, playboy and, eventually, baby sitter. In Japan, the English names for sexual organs are considered more polite than the Japanese terms, and pink is now the Japanese word for all erotic entertainment...
This combination of money and technology, show biz and sex appeal strikes many foreigners as the epitome of the American success story, and so they adopt English words that imply success itself: super, blue chip, boom, status symbol, summit. Some of that, clearly, is just snobbery. Through U.S. television, says British Grammarian Randolph Quirk, a foreigner can pick up an Americanized vocabulary "if you want to show you're with it and talking like Americans, the most fashionable people on earth." On the other hand, some upper-class Egyptian youths think it is chic to use Anglo-Saxon four-letter...
...good time at a reasonable cost. But by the early % 1950s, these Coney Islands of the Mind were crumbling along with the cities they served. Then Disney, who had already revolutionized the movie business with his Mickey Mouse short films and feature-length cartoons, conceived a new show-biz hybrid called the theme park. No rickety roller coasters, no sucker- fleecing games of chance, no sideshow tawdriness for Uncle Walt. At his place every path would be as spotless as Formica; every doorway would be scaled to just above kid-size; every "attraction" (not ride) would be sweet enough...
...birth of pointillist painting. Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West. A murderous barber and his woman companion who cooks the victims in pies. A bitter show-biz story of financial rise and moral fall--told chronologically backwards. The ruin of marriages. The disappointments of infidelity. The decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence...