Word: vulgarisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kevin Smith's Clerks., a rakish comedy set in a New Jersey convenience store, was proscribed for "language" -- a wittier, more stylized version of the wry obscenities that are the lingua franca of today's teenagers. "I don't want to become a poster boy for vulgarity," says Smith, 24, "but in this film it works. There's nothing in Clerks. that is more vulgar than the language Jennifer Jason Leigh uses as a phone-sex operator in Robert Altman's ( Short Cuts, and that movie got an R. In fact, that was done in a sexually titillating...
What kind of cockamamie lingo is slang anyway? Samuel Johnson railed against it, complaining about the corrupting influence on the English language of what in his day was called cant. Daniel Defoe hated it. Noah Webster, in his 1828 American Dictionary, defined slang as "low, vulgar, unmeaning." And in all the years since, legions of teachers have tried to eradicate...
Lighter observes that distinctions between "good" and "bad" English were virtually nonexistent before the mid-17th century, when the first dictionaries were issued. Words and phrases that are today considered vulgar expressions for bodily and sexual functions were once common currency among men and women of all classes. The King James version of the Bible referred in Leviticus to "stones" (for testicles); the Second Book of Kings used the common four- letter word for urine. Chaucer deployed 200 separate oaths in Canterbury Tales. And did anybody give a fiddler's intercourse about the proprieties? Dreck no! There weren...
Washington has office softball leagues, just like a normal city. Though the players may have an obsessive interest in GATT, land reclamation and the like, their team names betray a weakness for bad (occasionally vulgar) puns that is common to many Americans...
...World and Disney everything. I know. I am an expert on Disney. I've done Catastrophe Canyon five times and can recall every diorama of the Great Movie Ride in order. I've seen it all in the company of my son, age 9, who loved every innocent, campy, vulgar...