Word: slang
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Died. Louis MacNeice, 55, handsome Irish-born, sports-loving Greek scholar who, in the early 1930s, was briefly celebrated as one of the brash young Oxford poets, along with Auden, Spender and C. Day Lewis, who stood traditional English verse on its ear by mixing slang and sardonic wit, toff talk and tough thinking to comment on England between the wars; of pneumonia; in London. During World War II, MacNeice drifted away from poetry to become one of the BBC's top scriptwriters and producers; but his early verse, which he enjoyed writing "as one enjoys swimming or swearing...
...generation of Americans, "Body by Fisher" was an advertising slogan that became a symbol of automobile quality and a phrase so pervasive in the language that The American Thesaurus of Slang even lists it as one definition of "a well-formed young woman." All General Motors cars - some 70 million of them, from Chevrolets to Cadillacs (as well as some cars no longer around, such as La Salle and Oakland) - have long borne a little metal plate with the proud phrase on it. The seven stocky brothers who made their name a Detroit legend have faded from most memories; three...
...fresh as the best cup o' tea--in some spots actually improvised. And it is utterly authentic Cockney--so much so that much of the film is provided with English subtitles, though these are often unnecessary. The difficuty lies not in the Cockney accent but rather in the numerous slang terms, which are foreign even to the majority of Londoners...
...translate a sentence into Latin for him. When she revealed his desire to emulate Horace and rear a lasting monument by putting on his door "If you don't swing, don't ring" in deathless Latin chased in metal, I explained in vain the impossibility of translating slang. So I came up with Si non oscillas noli tintinnare and forgot about...
Chicago's 16-story Monadnock Building, built in 1891, required masonry 15 ft. thick at the base to support the crushing load. Such walls were made unnecessary by the so-called "curtain wall," hung from the building's frame. But since World War II, the architects' slang for a building's outer covering, "skin," has become especially appropriate; thin, lightweight metals and glass have turned more and more office buildings into glistening, icy slabs of graph-paper monotony. What Frank Lloyd Wright called "those flat-chested facades" has become a national vice...