Word: slangs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hackney's nomination. Israeli-born freshman Eden Jacobowitz was charged with racial harassment and threatened with probation for yelling, "Shut up, you water buffalo!" at a group of boisterous black women students outside his dorm. He denied any bigotry in the odd epithet, pointing out that it is Hebrew slang for an inconsiderate fool. On May 24, as the campus churned over the controversy, the women dropped the charges, but only after blasting the school for injustice...
Professor Dan Ben-Amos, an expert in Black culture and a linguistics expert, corroborated Jacobowitz's contention that "water buffalo" was a derivation of the Yiddish word "behema" which means "water oxen" and is slang for a "stupid person" or "fool...
...play with a scope and insight so engaging that they could only have arisen from his clear vision of his own adaptation. That adaptation is not ideal: it attempts to maintain the original text, but important phrases are "translated" into modern English. Since the important phrases are mainly sexual slang, this sometimes leads to clumsy contrast...
...like Walcott, had little choice in the matter. What poets do with their inheritances means everything. And Walcott's language has evolved from his early, rather stilted imitations of English poets into an instrument of marvelous flexibility: capable of grand, sweeping imagery but also of harsh interruptions and interjections, slang, pidgin and Creole patois and subtle Caribbean syncopations. The combined effect is a verbal radiance, of scenes illuminated by "a moon so bright / you can read palms...
Roget's also brims with the latest cliches and dirty words and an up-to-date compilation of slang and jargon; but it makes no pretense at distinguishing between the useful and the awful. Where the fourth edition labels slang as such, the fifth prefers "nonformal," an ambiguous term at best. The innocent "flaky" is nonformal -- but so is the vulgar "screw." The Black English verb "dis" (short for disrespect) is nonformal; so is "deep doo-doo," slang for predicament. What is even more puzzling is Roget's failure to draw distinctions between the "nonformal" and the downright unacceptable...