Word: slanging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...because the more he thought of this imagined place, the more it fascinated him. Its texture is rich and believable. Early in his career the President bankrupted the small nation to build an old folks' home at the base of a big mountain. Now, "mountain-viewing" is local slang for dying. That sounds real. And so does the quotation Leithauser slyly invents for Herman Melville, "on his sole North Atlantic whaling voyage" in 1850: Freeland, the great writer deplored, was "a humble acme in the planet's perennial pursuit of utter desolation...
...township slang) methylated spirits or absolute alcohol, taken as a drink or used for lacing drinks...
...movies have catapulted catchphrases before--Get Smart launched Would you believe...? and Sorry about that into nationwide use in the 1970s--but this newer slang is different. It is supposed to confer upon its users an edge, sometimes a comedic but always a faintly combative edge. The era of Saturday Night Live that dished out Dennis Miller's "I'm outta here" and Dana Carvey's "Isn't that special?" fed a hunger for a renewable supply of ironic put-downs. But what may have started as a boomer/Xer shtick has now become a reflex common to all ages, from...
...plays Holly on Santa Barbara, an American soap opera widely watched on Russian television. Inside, a full-page color photo portraying Zyuganov has been retouched to show him in a surgical gown, holding a sickle poised to slice into two eggs. In Russian the word for eggs is also slang for testicles...
When Tamika explains that the sensitivity plant is so named because it closes when you touch it, one young child cries out, "That's phat!" combining her childish wonder with hip street slang...