Word: slang
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...black truck driver, and ordered him fired, Alcorn complained of nausea and insomnia. He got his job back, but sued his employers for $110,000. The California court upheld his right to seek damages from a lower court on that basis. Wrote Justice Louis Burke: "Al though the slang epithet 'nigger' may once have been in common usage, along with such other racial characterizations as 'wop,' 'chink,' 'jap,' 'bohunk' or 'shanty Irish,' the former expression has be come particularly abusive and insulting in light of recent developments...
...that few Americans know who and what they really are. That is why few of these groups-or at least few of the children of these groups-have been able to resist the movies, television, baseball, jazz, football, drum-majoretting, rock, comic strips, radio commercials, soap operas, book clubs, slang, or any of a thousand other expressions and carriers of our pluralistic and easily available popular culture. And it is here precisely that ethnic resistance is least effective. On this level the melting pot did indeed melt, creating such deceptive metamorphoses and blending of identities, values and life-styles that...
...newspapermen weren't listening. Mike Royko, a columnist for the Chicago Daily News. had the Weathermen pegged as aristocratic dilettantes. "They spoke a combination of Negro slang, greaser jargon, and Marxist slogans, which is a bit hard to do if you have a Ph.D. in Anthropology and your father is a stockbroker...
...names floating about, no marketing man can be sure of avoiding a conflict. General Foods recently started test-marketing a snack product called Pringle's Pop Chips only to discover that Procter & Gamble was simultaneously testing Pringle's Newfangled Potato Chips. Even greater risks lurk in the slang of foreign languages. A leather-preservatives manufacturer tried to market a product called Dreck-until he discovered that the name means dirt (or worse) in German and Yiddish...
While giving his briefing, the sneaker is often scrutinized by a superior officer, who will dress him down if he does not finish on time, loses eye contact with his audience, or uses slang. Strong men tapped to be briefers for top brass have been known to tremble or vomit before performing, as if they were going into combat. Had he lived to see them, Philosopher William James might have found a new moral equivalent of war in briefings. The same kind of detailed planning goes into them, the same energy; and casualties could be reckoned in terms of those...