Word: franca
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kevin Smith's Clerks., a rakish comedy set in a New Jersey convenience store, was proscribed for "language" -- a wittier, more stylized version of the wry obscenities that are the lingua franca of today's teenagers. "I don't want to become a poster boy for vulgarity," says Smith, 24, "but in this film it works. There's nothing in Clerks. that is more vulgar than the language Jennifer Jason Leigh uses as a phone-sex operator in Robert Altman's ( Short Cuts, and that movie got an R. In fact, that was done in a sexually titillating...
...Mexican thinker Jose Vasconcelos in the '20s -- a glorious blend of mongrels and mestizos. It may be more relevant to suppose that more and more of the world may come to resemble Hong Kong, a stateless special economic zone full of expats and exiles linked by the lingua franca of English and the global marketplace. Some urbanists already see the world as a grid of 30 or so highly advanced city- regions, or technopoles, all plugged into the same international circuit...
...time, rock music was their essential cultural touchstone, a vein of deep feeling that seemed to flow through nearly every one of them. If the oldest boomers grew up on early Stones and the youngest arrived just in time to catch Van Halen, at least they possessed a lingua franca...
...Athens ceased to be a world power, and yet for the next 300 years, Greek culture, the culture of Athens, became the culture of the world." Much as the Greek language was the lingua franca of the world, Veliz sees the American version of English in the same role. "The reason Greek culture was so popular is very simple: the people liked it. People liked to dress like the Greeks, to build their buildings like the Greeks. They liked to practice sports like the Greeks; they liked to live like the Greeks. Yet there were no Greek armies forcing them...
...spreading of the global village has made cross-purposing a little easier. We think it only natural to ask for hors d'oeuvres from a maitre d' -- as natural, perhaps, as discussing Realpolitik and the Zeitgeist with a Hamburger. And as English has become a kind of lingua franca, all of us are fluent in Franglais and in Japlish. It really is possible for an un-self-made man, arriving in Paris, to ask a mademoiselle for a rendezvous and then take her for le fast food and le dancing and even, perhaps, le parking. But later she may call...