Word: slanging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...advertising here. "Smoke this," demands a new Winston Cigarettes ad. Smell This is the unsubtle brand name of a new fragrance. Taste This, urges Ellen DeGeneres' latest CD. Rock This! insists Chris Rock's recent tome. So what gives? It's part of the continuing evolution of louche street slang into the mainstream. And, if you buy this, consumers just like to be told what...
...Speaking from an urban slang perspective, people talk differently on the East Coast than the West Coast," he says. Accustomed to the distinctly Californian "hella" and "saucy," he notes, "mainly on the East Coast people say `yo' before and after every sentence...
...month McLaughlin, a four-year veteran in the Hornet, had spent practically every other day "in the box," aviator slang for flights over southern Iraq. The missions were routine, and until recently flyers joked that they would "have a better chance of seeing Jesus than an Iraqi jet." Even the past week, the skies had been quiet. No Iraqi radar had been turned on to "paint" the Nimitz's jets as targets, so far as the pilots could tell. Still, "every time you get in the jet and go over Iraq, you never know if this is going...
...human capacity for insult, denigration and blasphemy seems utterly boundless. University of Tennessee research associate professor Jonathan E. Lighter demonstrated this in 1994 with the first volume of his Historical Dictionary of American Slang (A through G). Volume II (Random House; 736 pages; $65)--beginning with H, a euphemism for hell, and ending 10,000 definitions later at the letter O with Ozzie, an Australian--once again reflects Americans' ingenious talent for verbal invention as well as Lighter's indefatigable scholarship...
...first volume, Lighter shows that most slang terms describe sexual activity or genitalia, or derive from the private lingo of a few groups: the underworld, students, the military, drug users and African Americans. Some terms are merely colorfully descriptive: a No-Tell Motel (1974) is a cheap trysting place; an Oklahoma credit card (1966) is a siphon tube used for stealing gasoline; a kiskeedee (1857) is a French-speaking person who is unable to understand English and keeps asking, "Qu'est-ce qu'il dit?" (What is he saying...