Word: slanging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...problems," says Carpenter, loading a plate of spaghetti and meatballs into the microwave. "But they mostly relate to language. These guys know some English, but they don't know American slang, and cowboys use a lot of slang, much of it unprintable." There was, for instance, some misunderstanding involving the word bull. Kaz and Harry arrived thinking it meant the male bovine, but when Carpenter and others say "that's a lot of bull," they may not be referring to cattle. "I don't always want to look everything up," admits Harry, who attends English classes at nearby Western Montana...
...dinner table, telling his friends of his son's college prospects, singing The Donkey Serenade to his ailing daughter. The details of his life are wonderfully exact: a bottle of Camel Royal Blue Ink, old copies of Bertrand Russell, an 1897 edition of Barrere and Leland's Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant. And Mistry catches the pungent cadences of Indian English as they have seldom been caught before: "What everything have you told them? Always I shout and scream, while nice Daddy watches quietly...
ANOTHER strange--pardon me, random--system of terminology at Harvard is the ever-growing "romantic encounter" slang. In a true melting-pot method, every student has brought a way of referring to the process of seduction from his or her high school. In a true Harvard semiotic (and pathetic) argument, the number of signifiers far outstrips the mystical signified object. (In other words, we have a lot of words for it, but it doesn't happen much...
...above are perpetrated under the influence of (illegally obtained) alcohol, you may have beer goggled. (Drinking habits, by the way, open up a whole new chapter in the study of Harvard slang, including at least 50 words for the act of imbibing and the condition of intoxication, not to mention about 100 more words to describe the regurgitation that follows. Even the word party, which most of us grew up thinking was a noun meaning "celebration," is now a euphemistic verb for "to drink...
Throughout On the Verge these "Victorian lady travellers" engage in an endless volley of pithy, alliterative, and highly allusive language. Plagiarizing from sources as varied as Joyce, Shakespeare, and the slang of fifties Americana, they wend their way through the kaleidoscopic landscape of "Terra Incognita," a territorial hybrid of the 19th century African Congo and the Land of the Blue Meanies from the Beatles' acid-crazed 1967 animation, "Yellow Submarine." This land is to be imagined rather than perceived: at the playwright's behest the set is relatively sparse...