Word: slanging
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...ages. This summer, in one eight-day period, four children were killed by stray gunshots as they played on the sidewalks, toddled in their grandmother's kitchens or slept soundly in their own beds. Six others have been wounded since late June. So many have died that a new slang term has been coined to describe them: "mushrooms," as vulnerable as tiny plants that spring up underfoot...
...whole subculture, complete with a new slang vocabulary, is fast emerging around the sport. Bladers hang out with rollerbuddies (friends) who prowl the asphalt in an eternal quest for greased turf (smooth pavement) and try to avoid rollerblood (injuries) at all costs. But remember: in rollerblade lingo, cobblestone is a dirty word...
That openness is yet to be reflected in textbooks, which have not been replaced. Modern dictionaries explaining high-tech and slang words are not available; geography teachers complain about a lack of up-to-date maps. "We learned about the working classes' victories over capitalism," says Annegrit Wernicke, 16. "But we hardly knew anything about Napoleon...
...Republican families, loyalty to the cause is instilled by grandparents, fathers, aunts; family scrapbooks are filled with snapshots of funerals and marches, and fading newspaper clippings of killings and arrests, not weddings and school recitals. But kids take to the streets primarily because it's "good crack" -- Irish slang for fun. To the kids, throwing stones and bottles is a game, an illegal act sanctioned by adults, and the best release from boredom. Six-year-olds will scoop up a stone and hurl it at a passing police van as smoothly as a beachcomber skips stones across the waves...