Word: slangs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...word to assemble the troop. The limping lieutenant, the tank commander, and the second in command followed him into the darkness. Only the sergeant was left in the room. "It's tough on them," he said. Soon the troop's armored cars, tanks and bantams (cavalry slang for jeeps), were rolling up the dark road, toward the rear. As we turned into the field where we would bivouac, the bearded sergeant said: "Well, it usually ends like this." He meant, not that it usually ended in retirement, but that any ending is an anticlimax for men who have...
Meanwhile the big American ground crew now stationed in the Ukraine worked at maintenance, spent its off hours learning some Russian and teaching the Russians U.S. slang. The first interchange of languages had already produced some startling results. One morning a Russian sentry greeted a U.S. colonel with a respectful: "Good morning, jerk...
...naval air zealots' way of thinking, the only choice for the Navy's top air job is a top-flight airman. Anything else is just "stooging," which is flyers' slang for pooping around. That was the reason joy was only tepid. The man picked to fill McCain's shoes was another naval officer belatedly made into an airman: genial, 60-year-old Vice Admiral Aubrey Wray Fitch...
...major period of writing stopped in 1914, when a doctor reminded him that he would be unable to collect royalties in a cemetery. There were plenty of royalties-from his succession of Broadway hits (The College Widow, The Sultan of Sulu), and from his famed Fables in Slang. In the Fables, wit-coated little tales told in capital letters, an American generation found a peculiar charm, for George Ade reworked the goody-goody stories of his time through a screen of Big City sophistication, making them gay but not risqu...
George Ade watched the U.S. forget Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, the great humorists of his youth, and knew that one generation's wit is another generation's banality. He saw his own slang ("the cold grey dawn of the morning after"; "I felt like thirty cents") become shopworn clichés. And he came to believe that the only funny thing he ever wrote...