Word: lighter
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Ultimately, if it falls short of the more profound psychodrama Havel may have been getting at, Rouse's production succeed's on a lighter plain, in the genre of self-ironic comedy...
...appreciation of slang's pungency that led Jonathan E. Lighter to begin collecting examples of street talk as a teenager. Now 45 and a research associate in the English department of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Lighter has launched the first of a planned three-volume Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang ($50), 1,080 pages teeming with more than 20,000 entries and etymologies, along with an illuminating survey. Volume I runs from a (as in a pig's a) through g (as in gytch, v., to steal); the second installment is due in 1996, the third...
...Lighter observes that distinctions between "good" and "bad" English were virtually nonexistent before the mid-17th century, when the first dictionaries were issued. Words and phrases that are today considered vulgar expressions for bodily and sexual functions were once common currency among men and women of all classes. The King James version of the Bible referred in Leviticus to "stones" (for testicles); the Second Book of Kings used the common four- letter word for urine. Chaucer deployed 200 separate oaths in Canterbury Tales. And did anybody give a fiddler's intercourse about the proprieties? Dreck no! There weren...
Inevitably, the bulk of Lighter's entries is concerned with scatology, illicit behavior, drunkenness, sex and genitalia. About 12 pages are given over to what is undoubtedly the most frequently used obscenity in the English tongue, the ever versatile F word. No other slang expression approaches it in its variety of permutation, application, hyphenation and intensification (e.g., unf -- -- -- ingbelievable). In its earliest recorded use (late 15th century), this word was possibly already taboo, says Lighter, who found it in a rhyming couplet written in cipher. The dictionary is rife with other synonyms for copulation; some are splendidly ingenious (for example...
Maybe the Lint Channel has already arrived. fX, launched three weeks ago by the Fox network, is perhaps the ultimate example of disposable television. Along with its lighter-than-air morning show and a slate of oh-so-familiar / network reruns (Hart to Hart, Batman, Family Affair), the channel features a pet show, a consumer guide to rock CDs and a collectibles program. If it weren't for a Nightline-style interview show hosted by former CBS correspondent Jane Wallace, the network would be so insubstantial that it might float away...