Word: slang
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...enforced segregation. The sudden, seismic synthesis of mainstream pop and down-home rhythm and blues was performed by Elvis Presley, who took R&B, fused it with a little country raunch and came up with rock 'n' roll. Even the generic name was a perfect synthesis: black slang, applied to the raucous music and then popularized by a disc jockey...
Convoy's script, based on C.W. Mc-Call's bestselling pop song, rarely flirts with logic. The dialogue, which is glutted with CB-radio slang and western-movie cliches, ranges from the absurd to the subliterate. We never understand why Rubber Duck's nemesis (the congenitally irate Ernest Borgnine) is after him or what the truckers' grievances are. What's worse, we don't care. Next to this muddleheaded film, F.I.S.T. starts to look like a dynamic political manifesto. Peckinpah tries to enliven the nonsense with slow-motion automotive stunts and barroom brawls...
...business), Grease managed to look engagingly tattered and funky. It was like an old yearbook in the carton of high school memorabilia we all keep stored somewhere in the back of our lives. But there was nothing static in the show's evocation of '50s style and slang. It moved, man, to the solid beat of a score that was capable, on occasion, of affectionately parodying the emerging rock sound of that era. Grease was a marvelous entertainment, mostly because it was unpretentiously true to the times it briskly summoned...
...master of invective, Mencken never failed to beguile his audience. Even Southerners were amused when he labeled Dixie the Sahara of the Bozart. And his classic encyclopedia, The American Language, brilliantly traced the wellsprings of slang and ethnic argot. But in larger matters he was more naive than the booboisie. When real goose-steppers came along, Mencken failed to perceive the German danger and, as Fecher notes, "brushed off Nazi treatment of the Jews." His literary criticism was sometimes blind to contemporary talent: he thought Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was "full of pink hooey" and found...
...claim that he turned to Moscow partly because the U.S. would not sell him weapons. In any case, the Soviets can hardly escape the many reminders of how quickly allegiances can change on the Horn. The Ethiopian soldiers still wear American-supplied uniforms; their weapons, ammunition and even their slang are mostly U.S.-issue too. Only a few have the new caps, supplied by the Soviets, that sport a hammer and sickle...