Word: flop
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mass exodus of junior faculty in the English department, a breach in the tenure process and the gone one day, back the next flip-flop of Waggoner Professor of Economics Robert J. Barro added to the mysteries surrounding tenure at Harvard this academic year...
Harvard administrators said they did not "top" Columbia's offer. Instead they attributed Barro's flip-flop to a change of heart...
...yesterday, in a stunning administrative flip-flop, Harvard officials backed away from that pledge--and what could have been millions of dollars in formal aid increases. Instead, officials simply reaffirmed their standing commitment to a summer of aid review...
...time when I would have been more skeptical. In 1993, shortly after the New York Times published a glossary of grunge slang from Seattle, a journal called the Baffler claimed that a prankster had hoodwinked the Times with the notion that grungesters used "swingin' on the flippity-flop" to mean hanging around, and said "harsh realm" rather than "bummer." I was forced to admit publicly that if I hadn't happened to read the Baffler just before a trip to Seattle, which was sure to include some browsing at the mother church of Eddie Bauer, I might well have replied...
...caution brought on by the flippity-flop episode evaporated, though, as my daughters, my only steady source of language freshening, grew up and left home. No longer did I have any way of knowing that Colorado College students called cadets at the nearby Air Force Academy "zoomies" or that the way to end a conversation you no longer had any interest in was to flip a palm toward the speaker and say, "Talk to the hand." If I'm desperate for the latest ghetto slang these days, I'm reduced to lurking on the subway near clots of beautifully turned...