Movies Popularizing Slang

Douglas Bigham TlhovwI at AOL.COM
Mon Aug 19 14:05:47 UTC 2002


In the more modern arena, I would suspect:
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High" by the clueless girl, Amy Heckerling;
"Valley Girl" with it's Val-Speak;
"Heathers" particularly for 'swatch dogs and diet coke heads';
"Bio Dome", the greatest movie ever, along with "Encino Man" made Pauly Shore
lingo (nugs, wea-sel, spooge, harsh as verb, etc.) popular for a brief
period, at least;
Anything and everything Star Trek seems to have done it's bit for science
(hypospray, anions, photon torpedo, warp speed, beam as a verb, etc.);
Since I've met many many people who have seen the movie, and not read the
book, I'd give 'moloko' and 'droogs' to "A Clockwork Orange" the movie,
rather than the book;
and lastly, any and all of the later SNL-linked movies (think Sandler,
Farley, Meyers) seem to have worked overtime, not so much in single words,
but with a heck of a lot of catch-phrases (party-on, livin' in a van down by
the river, zip it, shagadelic, etc).

Again, this is on the popularizing side, not necesssarily the coining side.
And this is also from memory, I could actually search these movies if anyone
would appreciate that.

-dsb
Douglas S. Bigham
In Transition...



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