Word: gag
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sackamenna Kid, a bowdlerized self-reference to his Sacramento origins, has it made in three-dot spades: Caen's column has appeared in San Francisco for all but three of the past 46 years, and its six-day-a-week mix of gossipy tidbits, hand-me-down gag lines and occasional nuggets of hard news, all separated by three-dot ellipses, is the closest thing to universal wisdom in the variegated Bay Area. Yet for all his clout as San Francisco's arbiter of the quotidian, Caen makes modest claims for his 1,000 words of items...
...three or four drafts usually, the first stiff and awkward, "like some English-class essay," and the last chatty and, in a carefully chiseled way, spontaneous. Advice to imitators: to avoid marooning yourself without provisions in a trackless last paragraph, think ahead of time of your cheery ending, the gag that leaves the reader newly hopeful that joining the French Foreign Legion may not be the only answer. Bombeck is proud of never missing a deadline, and she makes a point of quoting the praise of an elderly Detroit Free
...characters seem to aim straight for the jugular, then along the way, find something more diverting to do with all that energy. Whenever the occasion permits, Dante loves to undercut the visceral impact of the horror genre with a clip from an old movie or a spitballing, pratfalling sight gag. His loopy werewolf melodrama, The Howling (1981), and his profligately imaginative episode of last year's Twilight Zone: The Movie are both energized by this sly schizophrenia. In Twilight Zone, the smile becomes a rictus as a child forces adults to live inside a cartoon world of jack...
...Americans, bursting into an England gone drab and gray and plagued with shortages of everything after four years of war, were nothing if not jaunty. Residents of Somerset still remember G.I.s tossing chocolate bars and gum out of passing trucks to goggle-eyed children. According to a popular gag, so much American chewing gum had been tossed in the fountains of London's Trafalgar Square that the pigeons there were laying rubber eggs...
Gross me out baby, gag me with...