Word: slang
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...word was bandied about during the 1984 presidential campaign, when both Walter Mondale and George Bush found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to show that they were not wimps. Few dictionaries include the word; it may surprise some who use it that, according to Eric Partridge's slang dictionary, it means "a (young) woman," perhaps from "whimper...
...Gifted. She wrote what she calls Think-ercises. One typical example requires pupils to make a series of logical deductions to figure out how many points were scored by various members of a basketball team. Another tries to get children to think critically about language in terms of slang. How has the computer changed the meaning of common words like memory or menu? What might become slang terms of future technology...
Elsewhere, Boyd chooses to speak in the flat tones of people who seem quite foreign to him: the California pieces feel as if they have been patched together from David Hockney prints, late-night movies and a dictionary of American slang. Their sudden, destructive conclusions ultimately seem less forceful than forced...
...light faded, groups of pollos (chickens, a slang term for the immigrants, who tend to travel in flocks) filed into the canyons and the chase began. A border patrolman looking through an infrared nightscope at a hillside spotted four human shapes and summoned a helicopter hovering over a nearby ravine, but by the time the chopper arrived they were gone. Another agent was about to leap out of his truck and arrest three illegals in Moody's Canyon when his radio crackled out news of bigger game: a dozen immigrants heading toward the fields abutting Otay Mesa Road...
Police forces in Chile, according to Amnesty, inflict not only routine beatings but also a gamut of abuses referred to in sardonic slang. El telefono (the telephone) consists of blows with the palms of the hands on both ears simultaneously; la parrilla (the metal grill) is an electrical shock administered to the genitals; el submarino or la banera (the submarine or the bath) is a treatment in which the victim's head is held under water almost to the point of suffocation. Says Grantham: "Torture does not occur simply because individual torturers are sadistic. They tend to be servants...