Word: jerk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...young, as always, use slang as an instrument to define status, to wave to peers and even to discipline reality. A real jerk may be a nerkey, a combination of nerd and turkey. Is something gnarly? That may be good or bad. But if it is mega-gnarly, that is excellent. One may leave a sorority house at U.C.L.A. to mow a burger. Slang has less ideological content now than it had in the '60s. Still, it sometimes arises, like humor, from apprehension. High school students say, "That English test really nuked me." On the other hand, in black...
...Right now I would say that Buczko is the frontrunner," quipped Barbara Frappier Robertson's campaign manager She added that voters may simply go "knee jerk down the Democratic ticket without examining the candidates...
...opened one of the black diaries and at random picked out a few paragraphs. There was the description of a prominent Senator who had visited the Oval Office with a proposal that day. "Such a jerk," the President had noted. Reading through the diaries over these past months has given him new perspectives on his presidency. He now believes, for example, that he should have picked up earlier on the problems that the Shah of Iran was having at home. Flipping through the diary pages, he turned to a day in the fall of 1977 when he had stood with...
That spring night I was nosing through Noirland on the track of a sharpie named Steve Martin. Seems he's been breaking and entering the great movie genres of the past. Martin started off cleverly enough. Who cared that with The Jerk he was stealing from Jerry Lewis? But then, made reckless by success, the guy ransacked the old Busby Berkeley musicals and called the forgery Pennies from Heaven. Now he's pulled off his most daring heist. He's stolen from the tough-guy movies of the '40s, intercutting scenes of himself as a private...
...propose is a line drawn in the dirt. Those who are serious about reducing the deficit will cross it and work with us on our proposal or their alternatives. Those who are not sincere . . . will stay on the other side and simply continue their theatrics." He assailed "the knee-jerk reactions and the instant analyses" for being "as hasty as they were incorrect." Contended the President: "We must hold firm to our tax cuts and reduce the budget even more . . . We are at last and at least approaching the bend in the tunnel." Although Republicans control both legislative chambers...