Word: phrase
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...works all kinds of slick magic: it saves the speaker from accountability, establishes (wink-wink) an intimacy with the listener that only a shared and special secret can provide, even wields rhetorical power over space, time and motion. Science cores would do well to study this phenomenon. The phrase?: Happy Belated Birthday...
Birthday: The main noun of the phrase. A compound word, made of two nouns, the first of which, "birth" serves as more an adjective, describing the more nounly "day," indicating the day on which someone was birthed...
Then there's Belated. Here is where the real trouble starts. Belated, obviously another form of late, means "too late," "tardy." So this word set in the between Happy and Birthday transforms the phrase into a too late, finding your skate key, bubble of glee, day on which someone was birthed...
...What an honor it is [to win the election]...You don't understand how difficult it was to run against two very good friends," Beys said. "To borrow a phrase from my predecessor, we've got to hit the ground running...
Koons has, however, made a contribution to American culture in the form of comedy: the sight of so many critics, dealers and museum folk peering into the demitasse of his talent and declaring it an oracular well whose contents address issues, as the phrase goes, of class, race, money, sex, obscenity, beauty, power and desire. Art is short, bibliography long. Clearly, we are in Madonnaland, where every publicity hound -- oops, semiotician of mass culture -- must have his day in the museum...