Word: flipping
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...were encouraged to lie about their "body counts" (measuring progress in the war by lives taken, not land taken). Viet Nam gave rise to an elaborate language of deceit. Officialese was done in the Latinate: incursion, attrition, pacification, termination with extreme prejudice. The linguistic underside of that was the flip, sinister slang that the American G.I.s contrived: dinky dau (crazy), numbah ten (the worst), Charlie (the Viet Cong), grease (kill). The antiwar movement built a massive vocabulary of rhetorical excess about "fascist Amerika." Officers lied in writing up citations for their men and themselves. The Viet Nam Memorial...
Just a few years ago, the nation's long-haul truck drivers were celebrated as the last cowboys. Sitting high and lonesome in 18-wheelers, they put the pedal to the metal, trying to outrun "Smokey" and middle-of-the-road conformity. The flip side of the image: stressful schedules and strained marriages. But now split-level suburbia is the new deal on wheels. An up-and-coming crowd of diesel outriders are bringing their homes and their wives along in fully outfitted, self-contained living quarters set behind the driver's cab. If they need a handle, call this...
...narrative voice. the protagonists, with the exception of the child narrator of The Kid's Guide to Divorce," are all young, college-educated. But this is a protective device, as the husband of the protagonist in another story. "To Fill" says "Everything's a joke. You're always flip-flopping words, only listening to the edge of things. It's like you're always, constantly, on the edge...
When the lights flip on in a room infested with cockroaches, they all jockey for the nearest dark hole. This is because roaches are nocturnal, says Gary F. Alpert, an entomologist who gauges and makes recommendations on University cockroach problems. "If you see them during the day, you know you've got problems," he says...
...reading straight from a prepared typescript. But then, eager to give his measured words emphasis, he starts his right hand stirring the air in tight counterclockwise loops. And before long, like one of his new turbocharged cars, he revs up and zooms off, quoting himself, zigzagging between '60s idiom ("flip out," "bummer") and mild profanity, tossing away irreverent asides like empty beer cans. Hyperbole comes naturally, and repeatedly: to the analysts in Detroit, he said Chrysler's admittedly successful mini-van is "the hottest new product . . . in your lifetimes." Says Douglas Fraser: "I'm a hip shooter. I'll admit...