Word: lingo
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...colloquialisms evolve slowly. "Jag," "tops," "dude" stayed around for decades before they began to lose their freshness. But jazz lingo becomes obsolescent almost as fast as it reaches the public ear. A term of high approbation in the swing era was "out of this world," in the bop era it was "gone," and today it is "the greatest" or "the end." Similarly, a daring performance was "hot," then "cool," and now is "far out." These are the terms currently most often used by modern jazz addicts: ball, n. A good time; having a ball; enjoying oneself...
...economics and enrich the result with literary references from Tolstoy, Samuel Butler, Virginia Woolf, Castiglione, Jules Verne, Franz Kafka, St. Augustine, Nietzsche, Kathleen Winsor, E. M. Forster, Lionel Trilling, Cervantes, Jack London and James Joyce. His books are relatively free of academic jargon, because there is no special lingo that the economists, sociologists and anthropologists have in common; anybody who wants to talk to all of them has to use English...
...appeared unworried as he read a 20-minute statement: "I represent the feelings and sentiments of thousands of militant peasants compelled to take up arms since 1946 as a last resort to defend ourselves [against] calculated persecutions." Then he went on to attack his own Communist leadership, in Communist lingo, for having followed "a criminal adventurist policy of armed seizure of power through national uprising." He even praised the "U.S. Government and farsighted Filipino leaders [who] boldly decided to seize the initiative by compelling reform," and saluted President Ramon Magsaysay's "bold new program." He patted the West...
Preparation, in the course of which the Wellsman sets up his office and gets in touch with "potential leaders" (Wells lingo for men of means). Explains one Wells executive: "Potential leaders are men who frequently have been so busy with their own affairs that they have drifted away from the church . . . Subconsciously, they have the conviction that they haven't been doing enough work for the Lord and would like to know how they can gracefully become active. We provide them with the grace and the means...
...sentences to a halt with the too-arresting simile or metaphor. An hour crawls by "like a sick cockroach." A clam-lipped Marlowe says: "What I'd tell him you could fold into a blade of grass." But Chandler's world has a rasping authenticity, from its lingo to its lingerie...