Word: popped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...come to this country with nothing. Every morning they got on that subway, worked like dogs all day, got home at 8 at night, supported their families and educated their children. If they could do that, how dare anyone think they were less than anybody's equal? That was Pop's attitude...
...mother was the eldest of her generation--of nine children--and came from a slightly more elevated social station in Jamaica. She had a high school education, which my father lacked. ("Him who never finished high school," she would mutter when Pop pulled rank on family matters.) Before emigrating, Mom had worked as a stenographer in a lawyer's office. She was a staunch union supporter, a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. My father, the shipping-room foreman, considered himself part of management. Initially, they were both New Deal Democrats. We had that famous wartime photograph...
...appalled by the rise of sexually transmitted disease, by the wave of teenage pregnancies, by violent crime. Yet we drench ourselves in depictions of explicit sex and crime on television, in movies and in pop music. Language that I heard--and used--only on all-male Army posts is now scripted into the mouths of women, even children...
Seventy-five years is an eon in pop culture. In 1921 movies were silent, radio was an infant, television a dream, alcohol consumption a crime. There were few awards in fields of frivol: Oscars, Tonys, Grammys didn't exist. But some people in Atlantic City thought they should give a prize and a title to a pretty girl. The town was the East Coast's premier seaside resort, so she probably ought to wear a bathing suit. And hoping to extend the summer season, the pageant's creators scheduled it for after Labor...
...rabid Republican, we're guessing). But what usually comes across is the falseness, not of the contestants forced to reach for cheerful profundity, but of the format. Says humorist Harry Shearer, host of the syndicated weekly radio treasure Le Show and an avid trawler in the backwaters of pop culture: "I believe that if the serious guys on television had to discuss current affairs the way Miss America contestants do--gussied up in evening wear while an orchestra plays Isn't She Lovely?, and showing us their backsides after they finish--we'd have a better world...