BIGTIME, adv.

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Tuesday, March 20, 2001 10:34 pm -0500 Thomas Paikeday
<t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA> wrote:

> I may be a bit behind the times, but I seem to be hearing "bigtime" used
> adverbially more and more. The corpus I used for my last dictionary
> doesn't go further back than 1989. I just checked it and there are just
> two citations: "It failed bigtime" (AD'S MARKETING WEEK, 1990) and "It's
> paying off bigtime" (OILWEEK, 1990).

Some uses I've heard recently have seemed to be inspired by the Bush-Cheney
'major league asshole' dialogue.  A lot of political cartoons and satirical
piece re the executive branch are employing the term.

Lynne



M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320