Word: slang
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...sing. To play the canary. To be a stool pigeon. The blackest humor jeers behind the slang for acting as informer -naming names. To say the word "informer" is to evoke the history of betrayal, to hear the ring of 30 pieces of silver. Yet for a brief period in the late '40s and '50s the community's moral leper was promoted to something of a cultural hero. That elevation was not so odd as it first appeared. Soviet espionage, after all, was no fiction: wartime thieves of atomic secrets had been tried and convicted in federal...
Rorie said the use in colleges of standard English confounds some Black students who are used to slang but must write termpapers and read books in a different vocabulary...
...group of Muscovite dropouts run away to the Baltic beaches to escape the crushing conservatism of their elders. Old guard critics were scandalized, as much by the "uncivic" behavior of Aksyonov's heroes and heroines as by their use of colloquial speech, mixed with underworld and concentration-camp slang, invented words and such Americanisms as gudbai, Brodvei and bugi-vugi. Funny, fresh and richly expressive, Aksyonov's idiom has been his contribution to the larger effort of modern Russian poets to rescue the Russian language from deadening officialese...
...seniors are Kelly's star pupils. She also teaches a basic English class and acts as coordinator of teacher advisers at the Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Mass. If need be she can reason with students from slum backgrounds in their own street-wise slang, and she spends a good deal of time trying to make students understand that public school is still a gateway to opportunity. Says she: "My goal is not just academic; it's teaching kids what it is to be a human being...
...Head" is slang for a frequent drug user...