Word: slangs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Even the U.S. War Department took cognizance of British flyers' slang, solemnly announcing that "rhubarb" means "a target of opportunity." When a fighter pilot flies low over France, strafing whatever he finds - trains, troops, airdromes -he is "on a rhubarb...
...much R.A.F. slang will seep into the dictionary is a lexicographer's guess, but some of its catchier terms have already been adopted by groundlings. Among thousands of Americans, "browned off" already means fed up. ("Brassed off" means very fed up and "cheesed off" is utterly disgusted.) To crash is to "prang." To take a "dim view" is to look upon skeptically...
...sullen prisoners. Once over his astonishment that he is being treated like a human being and given more food than he has probably had for some time, the Jap undergoes a rapid readjustment. Often he becomes a happy-go-lucky prisoner with a passion for horseplay, cigarets, American slang and swing tunes. . . . Each prisoner is allotted five native cigarets daily, but they would gladly trade them all for an American cigaret. Their favorite expression...
...which lie, on the literate tongue, just between tantalizing half-memory and ready reference. H. L. Mencken's A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources ($7.50) was as rich a book for ruminators as the year brought; and The American Thesaurus of Slang ($5), edited by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark, came about as near completely corralling the living, dead and deathless in native idiom as could be humanly expected of one volume. The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music ($3.95) was the most comprehensive book of its kind ever...
...Marshal does not know U.S. slang...