Word: fad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...carbonated candy that crackled and popped when eaten. The candy was so effervescent that the company had to disprove rumors that children who swallowed the granules too fast would get a stomachful of carbonation. But the candy was nothing that youngsters could sink their teeth into, and the fad eventually lost its fizz...
Break dancing has been banned from certain shopping malls, sidewalks and no doubt countless living rooms as a public nuisance. But the ghetto-born dance fad, with its twirls, windmills and head spins, has shown remarkable staying power. As a result, dozens of entrepreneurs are making a fast break to cash in on its widespread popularity among teenagers by spinning off such accessories as clothing, how-to books and video games...
...soon the fad faded in red ink and rancor. The same black community leaders who would urge Paramount Pictures to suppress Ralph Bakshi's "racist" film Coonskin (and, a decade later, Sam Fuller's White Dog) were condemning blaxploitation as image suicide. Moreover, white liberal producers, reluctant to portray black men as rapists and dopers, failed to come up with alternatives. "If you're not working," says Actor Stan Shaw (Roots II), "you don't "get better...
...much a board game, more a way of life-this is Trivial Pursuit, the hottest cardboard entertainment since Scrabble, a flash-flood fad that looks to become an agreeable long-term habit. And as millions of informaniacs from the Hamptons to the White House West were testing their trivia wits this summer, the three Canadians (two former journalists and a retired hockey goaltender) who dreamed up the game in 1979 were secreted in a motel on the outskirts of Toronto, crash-coursing the last 2,000 or so questions for the Genus II U.S. edition of Trivial Pursuit...
Wall Street can be as slavish in following a financial trend as clothing designers are in copying fashion changes. This year's financial fad is the leveraged buyout. In these deals, the group of investors buying a company puts up the firm's assets as collateral. Since the loans needed for a leveraged buyout are thus backed by the company itself, there can be big profits for the investors, who often put up very little of their own cash. In one of the most celebrated leveraged buyouts, former Treasury Secretary William Simon and a group of financiers bought...