Word: slangs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Always together, eternally apart, these two ironic superheroes have a mediating companion, the impish cutpurse Phillipe (Matthew Broderick again). Not a bad premise for a wistful romance, especially when it stars three such appealing actors. Alas, the script (by Edward Khmara, Michael Thomas and Tom Mankiewicz) jumbles modern slang with chivalric sentiment; and Director Richard Donner (The Omen, Superman) is no spellbinder of medieval melancholy. "I believe in miracles," says the evil bishop (John Wood) who laid on the curse. "It's part of my job." Making miracles is Donner's job--and, Dick, you're fired...
...about their "body counts" (measuring progress in the war by lives taken, not land taken). Viet Nam gave rise to an elaborate language of deceit. Officialese was done in the Latinate: incursion, attrition, pacification, termination with extreme prejudice. The linguistic underside of that was the flip, sinister slang that the American G.I.s contrived: dinky dau (crazy), numbah ten (the worst), Charlie (the Viet Cong), grease (kill). The antiwar movement built a massive vocabulary of rhetorical excess about "fascist Amerika." Officers lied in writing up citations for their men and themselves. The Viet Nam Memorial is, in a sense, the most...
...word was bandied about during the 1984 presidential campaign, when both Walter Mondale and George Bush found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to show that they were not wimps. Few dictionaries include the word; it may surprise some who use it that, according to Eric Partridge's slang dictionary, it means "a (young) woman," perhaps from "whimper...
...Gifted. She wrote what she calls Think-ercises. One typical example requires pupils to make a series of logical deductions to figure out how many points were scored by various members of a basketball team. Another tries to get children to think critically about language in terms of slang. How has the computer changed the meaning of common words like memory or menu? What might become slang terms of future technology...
Elsewhere, Boyd chooses to speak in the flat tones of people who seem quite foreign to him: the California pieces feel as if they have been patched together from David Hockney prints, late-night movies and a dictionary of American slang. Their sudden, destructive conclusions ultimately seem less forceful than forced...