Word: verbs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Slot. Common euphemism for verb to kill. Others: take oiT, waste, drill...
Pointedly excluded, or specifically frowned upon, are such Americanisms as "bottom line" and the use of "alibi" to mean any excuse, rather than its strict judicial meaning of being somewhere other than at the scene of a crime. But such immigrants as "commuter" and "lobby" as a verb have now been accepted into the Queen's English. Happily or not, the indelicate "hooker" has also crossed the Atlantic, although usually in Britain the term refers to rugby players...
...dancers was lost as schools were closed. Mao's wife Jiang Qing (Chiang Ch'ing) decided that she just did not like two steps basic to the dance vocabulary, the entrechat and the pas de basque. So she had them excised, which was akin to taking the verb out of sentences. Now the ballet classes are filled again, and a classical ballet performance is the hottest ticket in China...
...Rafshoon" has become a Washington verb for image gilding; yet, it is hard to quarrel with an Administration attempt to get its act together and speak with one voice. Carter's problem has been more acute than most, since he for so long naively or generously let people like U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and now deposed White House Aide Midge Costanza pop off at will...
...Glassboro dean. "A detailed analysis," he worries out loud, "might well cause irreversible brain damage." But he risks it. One writer's offenses against God and good English, pretty much the same thing to Mitch, are carefully totted up: seven "comma faults," three "failures" of subject-verb agreement, two unpardonable cases of "purple fustian." The villain is hoist by his own "demonstrable inanities." To quote is to destroy-so goes Mitch's modus operandi...