9. "All those medical bastards should go through the ops they put other people through. Then they wouldn't talk so much bloody nonsense or be so damnably unutterably smug." (D. C.)
10. "I thought of going to the flicks," she said. "Or we could go for a walk if it keeps fine." (J.Br.)
11. "Let me warn you that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on, now, folks, shake a leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something." (S.L.)
12. "Goddamn sonofabitching stool," Fishbelly screamed, raining blows on Bert's head. "Lawd Gawd in heaven, I'll kill, kill every chink-chink goddamn chinaman white man on this sonofabitching bastard earth." (Wr.)
13. There was a fearful mess in the room, and piles of unwashed crocks in the kitchen. (A. T.)
14. "Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin Cities - took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U, and had my internship in a hospital in Minneapolis." (S.L.)
15. "How long did they cook you?" Dongeris stopped short and looked at him. "How long did they cook you?" "Since eight this morning. Over twelve hours." "You didn't unbutton then? After twelve hours of it?"
"Me? They got a lot of dancing to do before they'll get anything out of me." (Т. Н.)
16. "Nix on that," said Roy. "I don't need a shyster quack to shoot me full of confidence juice. I want to go through on my own steam." (B. M.)
17. "Go in there, you slob. I hope you get a hell of a lot of fun out of it. He looks too damned sick." (H.)
18. Just then Taylor comes down. "Shut up and eat," my mother says to him before he can open his mouth. In less than five minutes my father is back. "Keep the kids home," he says.
"My God," my mother says wearily, "them under foot all day." (Sh. Gr.)
19. "Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky." (T.C.)
20. "Never heard anything so bloody daft in all my life." (J.Br.)
21. "You know. The mummies - them dead guys that get buried in them toons and all." (S.)
22. His expenses didn't go down... washing cost a packet, and you'd be surprised the amount of linen he needed. (S.M.)
23. "We'll show Levenford what my clever lass can do. I'm looking ahead, and I can see it. When we've made ye the head scholar of the Academy, then you'll see what your father means to do wi' you. But ye must stick in to your lessons, stick in hard." (A. C.)
24. Wee modest crimson tipped flow'r,
Thou's met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crash amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow'r
Thou bonnie gem.
(R. B.)
25. "That's so, my lord. I remember having tae du much the same thing, mony years since, in an inquest upon a sailing vessel that ran aground in the estuary and got broken up by bumping herself to bits in a gale. The insurance folk thocht that the accident wasna a'tegither straightforward. We tuk it upon oorsels tae demonstrate that wi' the wind and tide setti' as they did, the boat should ha' been wellaway fra' the shore if they started at the hour they claimed tae ha' done. We lost the case, but I've never altered my opeenion." (D.S.)
III. Compare the neutral and the colloquial (or literary) modes of expression:
1. "Also it will cost him a hundred bucks as a retainer."
"Huh?" Suspicious again. Stick to basic English.
"Hundred dollars," I said. "Iron men. Fish. Bucks to the number of one hundred. Me no money, me no come. Savvy?" I began to count a hundred with both hands. (R.Ch.)
2. "...some thief in the night boosted my clothes whilst I slept. I sleep awful sound on the mattresses you have here." "Somebody boosted...?" "Pinched. Jobbed. Swiped. Stole," he says happily. (K.K.)
3. "Now take fried, crocked, squiffed, loaded, plastered, blotto, tiddled, soaked, boiled, stinko, viled, polluted."
"Yes," I said.
"That's the next set of words I am decreasing my vocabulary by", said Atherton. "Tossing them all out in favor of-"
"Intoxicated?" I supplied.
"I favor fried," said Atherton. "It's shorter and monosyllabic, even though it may sound a little harsher to the squeamish-minded."
"But there are degrees of difference," I objected. "Just being tiddled isn't the same as being blotto, or-"
"When you get into the vocabulary-decreasing business," he interrupted, "you don't bother with technicalities. You throw out the whole kit and caboodle - I mean the whole bunch," he hastily corrected himself. (P.G.W.)
4. "Do you talk?" asked Bundle. "Or are you just strong and silent?" "Talk?" said Anthony. "I, burble. I murmur. I gurgle - like a running brook, you know. Sometimes I even ask questions." (Ch.)
5. "So you'll both come to dinner? Eight fifteen. Dinny, we must be back to lunch. Swallows," added Lady Mont round the brim of her hat and passed out through the porch.
"There's a house-party," said Dinny to the young man's elevated eyebrows. "She means tails and a white tie."
"Oh! Ah! Best bib and tucker, Jean." (G.)
6. "What do you really contemplate doing?" "No Plaza? Not even when I'm in the ohips?" "Why are you so rich?" (J.O'H.)
7. "Obviously an emissary of Mr. Bunyan had obtained clandestine access to her apartment in her absence and purloined the communication in question." It took Lord Uffenham some moments to work this out, but eventually he unravelled it and was able to translate it from his butler's language. What the man was trying to say was that some low blister, bought with Bunyan's gold, had sneaked into the girl's flat and pinched the bally things. (P.G.W.)
8. ''I say, old boy, where do you hang out?" Mr. Pickwick responded that he was at present suspended at the George and Vulture. (D.)
9. "The only thing that counts in his eyes is solid achievement. Sometimes I have been prostrate with fatigue. He calls it idleness. I need the stimulation of good company. He terms this riff-raff. The plain fact is, I am misunderstood." (D. du M.)
10. "The scheme I would suggest cannot fail of success, but it has what may seem to you a drawback, sir, in that it requires a certain financial outlay."
"He means," I translated to Corky, "that he has a pippin of an idea but it's going to cost a bit." (P.G.W.)
11. Mrs. Sunbury never went to bed - she retired, but Mr. Sunbury who was not quite so refined as his wife always said: "Me for Bedford." (S.M.)
12. "He tried those engineers. But no soap. No answer." (J.O'H.)
13. "You want to know what I think? I think you're nuts. Pure plain crazy. Goofy as a loon. That's what I think." (J.)
14. The famous Alderman objected to the phrase in Canning's inscription for a Pitt Memorial "He died poor" and wished to substitute "He expired in indigent circumstances." (Luc.)
15. "I am Alpha and Omega - the first and the last," the solemn voice would announce. (D. du M.)
16. The tall man ahead of him half-turned saying "Gre't God! I never, I never in all my days seen so many folks." Mr. Munn thought that he, too, had never seen so many people, never before. (R.W.)
17. It may sound to some like cold-blooded murder of the English tongue, but American kids have been speaking a language of their own since they annoyed their Pilgrim parents at Plymouth Rock.
Ask a teen-ager today what he thought of last night's rock show. If he liked it, it was "wicked" or "totally awesome". But if he didn't, it was "groady" or "harsh".
Young people punctuate their sentences with slang. They drop phrases that would make Professor Henry Higgins turn over in his grave. Twice.
"It's just like a dictionary that only teen-agers understand," said Michael Harris, 17, a high school student in Richmond, Va. "You go home and you have to spell it for your parents. They don't even know what you're talking about."
But this has been going on for years. Slang is as old as English itself, says Stuart Berg Flexner, editor-in-chief of the Random House Dictionary, author of the Dictionary of American Slang.
It offended puritan parents that their Pilgrim children took their traditional farewell - God be with you - and turned it into "good-bye", Flexner says.
Today's words are obsolete tomorrow.
"I may call somebody a jerk, but today they would call him a nerd," says Flexner, 54. "Each generation seems to want to have some of its own words."
"It's not so much to shut out adults - although that's a part of it. It gives them identity with their own age group. They sort of belong to their own club," he says.
There is valleytalk and preppyspeak, jocktalk and street language.
Take Moon Unit Zappa's Valley Talk. The daughter of famed rocker Frank Zappa was 14years old when her dad sat her before a microphone and documented her language in a pop song.
"Gag me with a spoon," she says to show disgust. "Groady to themax."
Legions of youngsters across America picked it up. The song, and language, was a coast-to-coast hit. But that killed it.
"Valley Speak is out," reports Jane Segal, 16, a reformed Valley Girl at Santa Monica High School. "It went out after the song was played to death. It was really popular, and then everyone got so sick of the stupid song they quit saying that stuff."
"No one ever says 'Gag me' anymore," she says. "'Totally' is still hanging on, and everyone uses' "like". They say it everywhere, just sprinkle it in. I do it subconsciously, I use it like "um."
Flexner considers slang.a reflection of American pop culture. Words come and go like No. 1 hit songs. Once a word is widely known it may be dropped, relegated to the used-slang bin alongside "swell" from the '50s and "groovy" from the '60s.
Others stick around like golden oldies.
"There are classics. Once" a good phrase comes along it's pretty hard to replace it," says Scott Wenger, 19, a New York University student. "Flipped" out still means crazy and "pulling an allnighter" still means to study.hard until all hours of the morning for exams."
Teen-agers may dream up slang, but adults use it too. Julia Shields, 42, a high school English teacher in Charlottesville, Va., is an avowed user.
"I love slang, think it's colorful, wonderful, metaphoric. Some of it is quite clever," she says. "I hate it, but I call everything "neat". It's such a horrible, vague, meaningless word. But I use it in every sentence."
Slang is not the talk of board rooms and diplomatic sessions. Because young people spend more time informally than adults, and slang is a product of relaxing the rules, high schools and college campuses are breeding grounds for it. (C. R.)
IV. Speak about the difference between the contextual and the dictionary meanings of italicized words:
1. Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was the citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. (J.J.)
2. He does all our insurance examining and they say he's some doctor. (S.L.)
3. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic. (S.L.)
4. "What do you think?" The question pops their heads up. (K.K.)
5.We tooled the car into the street and eased it into the ruck of folks. (R.W.)
6. He inched the car forward. (A.H.)
7. "Of course it was considered a great chance for me, as he is so rich. And - and - we drifted into a sort of understanding - I suppose I should call it an engagement -"
"You may have drifted into it; but you will bounce out of it, my pettikins, if I am to have anything to do with it." (B.Sh.)
8. He sat with the strike committee for many hours in a smoky room and agonized over ways and means. (M.G.)
9. Betty loosed fresh tears. (Jn.B.)
10. When the food came, they wolfed it down rapidly. (A.M.)
11. He had seen many places and been many things railroad foreman, plantation overseer, boss mechanic, cow-puncher, and Texas deputy-sheriff. (J.R.)
12 Station platforms were such long, impersonal, dirty, ugly things, with too many goodbyes, lost hearts, and tears stamped into the concrete paving. (A. S.)
13. "Let me say, Virginia, that I consider your conduct most unbecoming. Nor at all that of a pure young widow."
"Don't be an idiot. Bill. Things are happening."
"What kind of things?"
"Queer things." (Ch.)
14. I need young critical things like you to punch me up. (S.L.)
15. Oh! the way the women wear their prettiest every thing' (T.C.)
Metaphor. Metonymy. Synecdoche. Play on Words. Irony. Epithet.
Hyperbole. Understatement. Oxymoron
You know by now that among multiple functions of the word the main one is to denote, denotational meaning thus being the major semantic characteristic of the word. In this paragraph we shall deal with the foregrounding of this particular function, i.e. with such types of denoting phenomena that create additional expressive, evaluative, subjective connotations. We shall deal in fact with the substitution of the existing names approved by long usage and fixed in dictionaries by new, occasional, individual ones, prompted by the speaker's subjective original view and evaluation of things. This act of name-exchange, of substitution is traditionally referred to as transference, for, indeed, the name of one object is transferred onto another, proceeding from their similarity (of shape, colour, function, etc.), or closeness (of material existence, cause/ effect, instrument/result, part/whole relations, etc.).
Each type of intended substitution results in a stylistic device (SD) called also a trope. The most frequently used, well known and elaborated among them is a metaphor - transference of names based on the associated likeness between two objects, as in the "pancake", or "ball", or "volcano" for the "sun"; "silver dust", "sequins" for "stars"; "vault", "blanket", "veil" for the "sky".
From previous study you know that nomination - the process of naming reality by means of the language - proceeds from choosing one of the features characteristic of the object which is being named, for the representative of the object. The connection between the chosen feature, representing the object, and the word is especially vivid in cases of transparent "inner form" when the name of the object can be easily traced to the name of one of its characteristics. Cf.: "railway", "chairman", "waxen". Thus the semantic structure of a word reflects, to a certain extent, characteristic features of the piece of reality which it denotes (names). So it is only natural that similarity between real objects or phenomena finds its reflection in the semantic structures of words denoting them: both words possess at least one common semantic component. In the above examples with the "sun" this common semantic component is "hot" (hence - "volcano", "pancake" which are also "hot"), or "round" ("ball", "pancake" which are also of round shape).
The expressiveness of the metaphor is promoted by the implicit simultaneous presence of images of both objects - the one which is actually named and the one which supplies its own "legal" name. So that formally we deal with the name transference based on the similarity of one feature common to two different entities, while in fact each one enters a phrase in the complexity of its other characteristics. The wider is the gap between the associated objects the more striking and unexpected - the more expressive - is the metaphor.
If a metaphor involves likeness between inanimate and animate objects, we deal with personification, as in "the face of London", or "the pain of the ocean".
Metaphor, as all other SDs, is fresh, orginal, genuine, when first used, and trite, hackneyed, stale when often repeated. In the latter case it gradually loses its expressiveness becoming just another entry in the dictionary, as in the "leg of a table" or the "sunrise", thus serving a very important source of enriching the vocabulary of the language.