Word: phrase
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Things people talk about at dinner strike me as enormities that in a more logical world would suffice to dry up the ocean or turn it to blood. The cover of a catalog, the catch phrase of a TV ad, a glimpse of a flyer posted in the square, trouble...
...line between real and authentic gets harder to discern. With Gore, it varies from moment to moment. When he chirps about devoting his life to "change that works for working families," he is just spewing a contrived phrase. But for what it's worth, I think I saw a bit of the real Al Gore a few years ago when I interviewed him about the environment. The session was supposed to last 15 minutes. It went on for 90 as Gore talked about ozone depletion, at times pulling out charts like a college professor. His passion seemed pretty real...
Language as it evolves is like the game of Broken Telephone, in which a whispered phrase gets increasingly distorted as it passes from lip to ear. Eventually speakers no longer discern the rule behind a motley set of mangled verbs. They just memorize them as a list, as do subsequent generations. These are the irregulars, the fossils of dead rules...
...Three months later--three months!--Ben Affleck becomes her rebound man. A short while later, he gets spit out on Santa Monica Boulevard by the Gwynesaurus, and she macs on Guy Oseary, a Madonna ex-flame. She's becoming one of those celebrities who has an automatic apositive phrase with her list of ex-lovers after her name. (And poor Ben! Once the poster child of masculinity, he's been turned into a sniveling idiot by the One Woman Love Machine. He still buys her diamonds and expensive gifts and tries to be her best friend; she gladly uses them...
...stock phrase from this year's recruiting sessions is a variation of: "We know a lot of these slide presentations and speeches sound alike. We're going to show you tonight what makes our firm stand...