Word: jargon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...more successful device is the use of the voices of what seems like hundreds of individuals. Each voice, in the inflection of its own part of the world and in the jargon of a particular martial trade, gives one molecular view of the campaign. A Brooklyn tankman tells of his disgust when his tank runs out of gas, a Canadian describes the hideous fighting around Caen, a Royal Navy man admits his road sickness when his assault craft is trucked cross-country to the Rhine, a Negro cook tells how he learned to fire a bazooka at Bastogne, a primly...
...short Comcincsnafbabu. ... All in all, she finds the Navy pretty rugged. When she quits, or we should say is returned to inactive duty, we're afraid she'll bring along a lot of that naval doubletalk. We really don't want any. An expert in naval jargon advises us that we should threaten, if she does, to take her down to the Potomac and give her the Deep...
...halls) and tried to make themselves agreeable to burlesque headliners, variety artists and minstrels. Today 540 of them throughout the U.S. pay dues to a union (the A.F. of L.'s Music Publishers' Contact Employees) and earn from $150 to $1,000 a week. With a trade jargon all their own, they classify themselves as "payolas" (the affluent and gift-bearing), "car men" (those with limousines to transport bandleaders) and "sitters" (who operate exclusively in night clubs). The "weepers," who are. looked on with contempt by their colleagues, appeal to a contact's sympathy...
...Sell a "Character." But gargantuan sets were easy by comparison with the problem of converting a famously cold and fiercely arrogant intellectual-in the withering jargon of show business, a "character"-into a cinema hero. The makers of Wilson have gentled, sweetened, warmed, simplified and softlighted Woodrow Wilson's complex personality in every way the facts allowed. Their title-role choice of Canadian-born Alexander Knox, largely for his excellent voice, was well-nigh perfect for the purpose...
Unloading the Detail. The 89 pages given over to wartime Washington are a brief masterpiece of social reporting. No U.S. writer can match Dos Passos' use of the hackneyed, senseless, stupefying jargon of political insincerity. Nor is any other writer so quick to detect the process by which ideas harden into cliches, stock answers, pat remarks as offensive as the slamming of a door...