not
In the Sunday Times a couple of week's ago, I saw a usage written down - previously, I'd only heard it in speech. The headline read: 'Dumb Blondes, Not!' It was an article about a group of very high-powered women, and the headline was saying - Dumb blondes, they are not!
Well, you can see what it is, it's an abbreviation to the word 'not'. It's an unusual usage, putting the 'not' at the end, instead of in the middle. It's a bit like a tag - you know - tag questions, and tag statements. It's used to negate a statement of fact.
But it's more than just a negative. It's actually emphasising the negative opinion of the speaker. The speaker is really saying, 'What I've just said is rubbish!' It's like, 'No way!' or 'I don't think so!'
So it's usually used after an opposite point of view. I heard somebody say this coming out of a cinema, 'O, yeah, it was great film, not!' And then I've heard, 'This is a cool website, not!' And, 'Sure we're ready, not!'
So listen out for it. It's a fashion and it might not last. And if it doesn't, you can always say, 'That's a cool bit of slang, not!'
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out
In the early 1990s, the word 'out' came to be used as a verb. 'To out someone' meant to tell the world that the person was a homosexual, usually a public figure. It was short for 'coming out of the closet', 'out of your cupboard', 'out of your house'.
It then developed. People who do the 'outing', who tell the world about the people, are 'outers'.
And then, people have been 'outed'. So, all kind of other usages developed. Gay rights activists took up the word. And now there are several websites with 'out' in the title.
'Coming out' is now a positive term, referring to anyone who decides to tell others about their sexuality, men or women. There was a flurry of usage in early 2006, as British MPs admitted to being gay. Note the usage, a headline read: 'Quite a few MPs have come out in parliament.' Now, that's not referring to the fact that they're leaving the room! It isn't just a verb of motion any more.
So be prepared for some unusual usages. A news report recently talked about 'electing its first "out" gay president'. "Out" was in inverted commas, as a sort of adjective. Usage is still broadening. To be out is in!
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------phat
Now, this is a difficult one for speech, 'phat', not 'fat'. You can usually tell the difference because 'fat' is for animates: people and animals and things, people are 'fat', animals are 'fat'. 'Phat' is used with things or general states of affairs, people say, 'You know, that's a phat beat!' or 'It's very phat down by the river!'
Well, it sounds like a modern usage, doesn't it? It means, excellent, great, cool? you know, it's phat down by the river, it's lovely to be down by the river.
As a word, it's been around since the early 1990s. It's from hip-hop slang. It originally meant sexiness, real sexiness in a woman. Although, it had all sorts of etymologies, I wouldn't believe them all - I mean, one was, 'pretty, hot and tempting', p-h-a-t, and there are some ruder etymologies as well, let me tell you.
You'll still encounter it, but the homophony, the fact that the two words sound the same - phat and fat - has made it ambiguous. I don't think it ever really caught on. I do hear the word around a lot in 2006, but I think it's on the way out. It's not phat, to say phat, any more!
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thirty-something
This phrase, 'thirty-something', it came in in the 1980s referring to people of an unspecified age between 30 and 40. These were members of the baby boom, the people who were born 20, 30 years before and entering their 30s now and not knowing how to cope - or at least, that was the idea.
It was the name of a television series. It also became the name of a film. People who had lost their freedom, was the idea. Children, they'd got now, demanding jobs, approach of middle-age, gloom! There's a website which says it's 'personal growth for thirty-somethings'.
It's used both as an adjective - 'she's a thirty-something career woman'. And it's also used as a noun, as I just did - 'the thirty-somethings'.
And then, the ending got applied to others. We started to hear 'twenty-somethings'. And now we've got 'forty-somethings' - that was a television show in 2003, 'Forty-Something'.
Well, it can be any age. The implication is always that there's a set of values or problems associated with that age.
Me? I'm sixty-something!
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wicked
Wicked! Note the intonation. It means 'wonderful', 'great', 'cool', 'splendid'. It came into English from United States' black slang in the 1980s or maybe earlier. Certainly it arrived in Britain in the late 1980s.
It was part of a trend which goes back decades to use bad words to mean good concepts, or the other way round. I mean you might remember saying, 'that's great!' meaning 'it isn't great'. And always there's been this use of the word 'naughty' to mean 'nice'. So it's part of a general trend.
It's mainly used as an adjective in front of a noun, you know, 'we had a wicked time!' Or, of course, you can use it on its own, just saying, you know, 'wicked!' as a reaction - that's how youngsters use it. And youngsters, of course, knowing that grown ups are now using it as well, have decided to use other bad words in the same sort of way - I've heard from young people in recent years, the last couple of years, words like 'evil' meaning 'good', you see, or 'brutal' meaning 'good'.
Wicked is still around. It's meant, of course, that the traditional sense of wicked is now being squeezed out, much as 'gay' made it difficult to use the traditional sense of 'merry' or 'cheerful' when it started to be used in reference to homosexuals. So with wicked, tone of voice is the only way to make the distinction between the old meaning and the new meaning, and even that's ambiguous sometimes, so you have to be careful, and pay very careful attention to the context.
And notice that the word is extending its use. The other day, for the first time, I heard somebody say, 'wicked cool' meaning 'very cool'.
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wuss
'He's a wuss.' 'She's a wuss.' It means ineffectual person, indecisive, weak. It's from the United States; it came in in the 1980s. To be honest, I didn't think it would last, but it's still here.
It has a very unclear etymology. It may be from 'wussy' - that is from pussy wussy, you know, the pussy cat. It's a kind of talking down about a cat. Or it might be a blend of 'wimp' - that is an ineffectual person - plus 'pussy': wimp/pussy, wussy, wuss.
'Stop being a wuss!' - that's the usage you hear a lot these days. Anyway, whatever the etymology, a politician was said to be 'a liberal wuss' - that is a coward. And there are even Wuss Awards now. I saw on the web the other day, 'Who was the biggest Wuss of 2005?' - with a capital W - this is obviously something very attractive to be.
The word seems to be developing. It's become a verb - 'Stop wussing!' 'Ah! He's wussing around!' And I've even seen a new noun, wusser, wussers - 'We're all wussers now!' 'We've all become a complete pack of complete wussers,' says somebody on a website.
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Wysiwyg
Wysiwyg. But it's not spelt as it sounds. Wysiwyg. It's an acronym meaning 'what you see is what you get'. It came in in the early 1980s in computing. It meant that what you see on the screen is what you get in the output. For example, you type something on the screen and when you print it out, it looks just like it's on the screen. Wysiwyg. It was especially found in desktop publishing.
So it's a technical term then? Well, yes, but the phase actually isn't. And that's the thing I want to draw your attention to - the phrase was never technical.
It actually started in the United States, in a television show, in the early 1970s; it was called 'Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In'. An actor there called Flip Wilson appeared as a cross-dressing character called Geraldine and as he came on, he would say, 'what you see is what you get!'
And I've heard it used since in all sorts of circumstances. I've heard it used in restaurants referring to the food - 'what you see is what you get'. And in a tourist brochure referring to beautiful scenery - 'come to this country and what you see is what you get' - that is, the tourist guide will give you everything you expect. And it got its accolade, I think, this phrase, when Britney Spears had a song which included it - 'because I can promise U baby what you see is what U get' - the word 'you' was spelt with just a capital letter 'U'.
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up to date your English
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o you get on with them? 