Word: slang
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...alone was 125%) and hard to get that Spaniards dubbed them "haigas"-a slang term indicating that their owners were either very rich, very powerful or very crooked. Last year 170,000 vehicles came off the assembly lines of seven separate factories in five Spanish cities, and production is expected to double this year; the entire 1966 output of the Spanish-made SEAT cars is already sold out by dealers. Madrid's streets have become so clogged that the city has had to restrict parking in the downtown area. It has also opened three underground garages, one of which...
...raphin Audiberti, 66, leading French avant-garde playwright, novelist and poet, a surrealist who enlivened the French stage in 1946 with Quoat-Quoat, a bitter commentary on self-martyrdom, and in 19 other plays depicted the conflict of good and evil in a jarring mixture of scatological slang and 16th century classicism, in 1962 causing near riots when the most scandalous of all, The Ant in the Body, was consecrated at France's venerable Comédie-Française; of cancer; in Paris...
...limited four-letter vocabulary tends to rob the words of what legitimate shock effect they used to have. "Powerful words should be reserved for powerful occasions," says Novelist Philip Toynbee. "Words like money can be devalued by inflation." Stuart B. Flexner, co-author of the authoritative Dictionary of American Slang, believes that this is already happening. "The next step is to find a new crop," he says, "but I don't know yet what these will...
...carry on the work. On top of that, the syndicates exercise a censorship that is breathtaking. When Dale Messick included a Negro girl among a group of teenagers in Brenda Starr, the syndicate rubbed her out for fear of offending Southern readers. When Milt Caniff used the Air Force slang word abort (to cancel) in Steve Canyon, the syndicate figured it came too close to abortion and changed it. In their own defense, the syndicates claim that newspaper editors are extremely touchy about reader reaction and demand immaculate strips. But as one indignant cartoonist puts it: "A syndicate editor reminds...
...disciplinarian. Father was a well-intentioned fuddy-dud. Except for the fact that Father was also a judge, the story sounds like the childhood of thousands of people who end up in psychiatrists' offices. But Bill Sands ended up not on a couch but on "the Shelf"-jailbird slang for the solitary-confinement cells at San Quentin prison. Before he was 21, Sands was serving time on three convictions for armed robbery, with sentences in each of from one year to life, and had won a reputation as a con so "solid" that not even brutal beatings by guards...