Word: vacuum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Normally I wouldn't touch Ed Schools with a 10-ft. pole, they seem to be working in a vacuum, without a lot of relevance to what I'm doing in my school," says Patricia S. Shaefer, an elementary school principal from Minneapolis Minn...
Some Spanglish sentences are essentially English with a couple of Spanish words thrown in ("Do you have cold cerveza?"). Others are basically Spanish in structure with Hispanicized words borrowed from English ("Donde esta el vacuum cleaner?"). The confluence of the two languages is also producing new verb forms that are not found in any textbook. "Quieres monkear?" is one way of saying "Want to hang out?" Borrowed from the slang infinitive "to monkey around," the Spanglish verb monkear is used in the same way as truckear, which refers to working around trucks, shopear (i.e., at the market) and mopear...
Reina came from El Salvador because of "horrible things." She says simply, "I got scared." When she finally reached Los Angeles and found a job as a housekeeper at $125 a week, her new employer pointed to the vacuum cleaner. Vacuum cleaner? Reina, 24, had never seen such a thing before. "She gave me a maid book and a dictionary," says Reina, who now writes down and looks up every new word she hears. "That's how I learn English. I don't have time to go to school, but when I don't speak English, I feel stupid...
...legislative process with those concerned with it having so little idea of its potential effects. No one can say for sure whether immigration reform can be made to work, what it might cost and, most important, whether it would ultimately help or hurt the country. In that informational vacuum, politicians, businessmen, labor leaders, minority representatives and social scientists have taken positions on all sides of the issue. President Reagan is maintaining a discreet profile, hoping only for a policy that is "fair and nondiscriminatory...
...earlier word was "quality," whose utterance was meant to mark off a given artwork from the swarm of others and confirm the precision of a collector's taste. Interesting has the opposite effect. It suspends judgment, covers the rear, and defends the vacuum-cleaner habits of a cultural mass market without precedent in art history. It states, with a sort of coy defiance, that buying this, uh, thang may not be a mistake, even though its owner does not know what to say about it. It acknowledges that by the time thoughtful aesthetic judgment is passed -- a distant prospect, given...