Word: slang
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lines" that fetch in cash and drugs from the outside. Nothing else much matters. All the other undercurrents of prison life feed into this network of domination--the meals, the exchanges with guards, the vocational training programs. Every activity provides a chance to jockey for influence. Every bit of slang becomes a code-word. Every move somehow reflects on the prison hierarchy...
...calls for baroque extravagance and Berger provides plenty. Esoteric words ("canescing," "superfetation," "glabrous") gambol freely with lowlife slang. Natalie Novotny, Wren's girl friend, refuses his offer to pay for dinner because he has already picked up the Czech. Objects and people are described in loopy, gargantuan locutions. A chandelier becomes a "hippodrome for silverfish"; an incidental character has "the dental terrain of a boar...
Similarly, David Mamet's play is a sort of junk shop of language, and it too is forlornly eloquent. The speech of Mamet's three characters-the owner of the store and two neighborhood punks who hang out there-is an incrustation of street slang, non sequiturs, malapropisms and compulsive obscenity. The playwright revels a bit too much in this scatology and blasphemy. Delete the most common four-letter Anglo-Saxonism from the script and his drama might last only one hour instead of two. But Mamet has an infallible ear for the cadences of loneliness and fear...
...company holds assets of $300 million in rubber plantations and palm-oil industries on the Malay peninsula, yet it keeps its headquarters in Singapore and is registered in London. For years it had a reputation for mistreating and underpaying its workers, who bitterly dubbed the firm "Swine Bobby" (slang for pig feed) or "Slime Darby...
...Digger" is a slang term first used in the 1850s to describe a miner in the Australian gold fields. It was popular in World War I as a nickname for an Australian soldier, and today is sometimes employed as a generic name for any Australian...