Word: slangs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...American slang is fed by many tributaries. Feminists are busy networking-the liberated version of using the old-boy network. Cops, as sardonic with language as criminals are, refer to a gunshot wound in the head as a serious headache. Drug users have their codes, but they seem to have lost some of their glamour. Certain drugs have a fatality about them that cannot be concealed in jaunty language. The comedian Richard Pryor introduced the outer world to freebasing a couple of years ago, and John Belushi died after he speed-balled (mixed heroin and cocaine). Punk language has made...
Television has developed an elaborate jargon that has possibilities as slang. Voiceover, segue, intro and out of sync have been part of the more general language for a long time. Now there is the out-tro, the stand-up spiel at the end of a news reporter's segment. A vividly cynical new item of TV news jargon is bang-bang, meaning the kind of film coverage that TV reporters must have in order to get their reports from El Salvador or the Middle East onto the evening news...
...Black slang may not be quite as strong as it was in the '60s. That may mean either that black slang is less productive than before or that it is more successful at remaining exclusive and secret...
...richest new territory for slang is computer technology. That is unexpected. Slang is usually thought of as a kind of casual conversation in the street, not as a dialogue between the human brain and a machine. Those who go mountaineering up the interface, however, are developing a wonderfully recondite vocabulary. Hackers (computer fanatics) at M.I.T. and Stanford maintain a Hacker's Dictionary to keep their common working language accessible to one another. Input and output have long since entered the wider language. So have software and hardware. The human brain in some circles is now referred to as wetware...
...word, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "is the skin of a living thought." The flesh of slang is a little weaker than usual now. Why? For several reasons. Perhaps slang follows the economy and now finds itself a bit recessed...