At the turn of the century (the 21st century, that is), everyone was talking about Y2K, the computer bug that many feared would crash computer systems at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999, creating a world-wide apocalypse. That didn’t happen, of course, but “Y2K” became the first of many new overused words and phrases of the decade. After the jump, check out which other words and phrases people have been uttering way too much in the past 10 years. Keep reading »
I learned two things from Pimp Your Vocab by Lucy Tobin, a book that attempts to decipher British kids’ “Teenglish.” Numbero uno: no matter how hard adults try to pin down and define teenage slang, they always end up sounding hopelessly out of touch and weird. I mean, really, peeps felt the need to include “cool beans” in this volume!? Isn’t that from, like, forevs ago? Also, when you define “woop woop” as “noise made to denote happiness,” well, we can’t help but laugh. BTW, British kids have some very, very odd slang. Apparently, in England “blud” means friend and “soz” is sorry. After the jump, check out some other vocab that I’m really glad hasn’t reached the States. Keep reading »
There are some words and phrases that we here at The Frisky are so over hearing that whenever one of us utters one, someone else says, “Can we retire that word yet?” So far we haven’t been successful in coaxing any of the words into a condo in Boca Raton to live out their Golden Years in relative silence. But maybe if we all work together, we can limit their appearance in everyday speech. After the jump, words and phrases we’re ready to see retire! Keep reading »
Yesterday’s Urban Dictionary word of the day was “butter face,” defined as:
“n. A girl who is hot, except for her (but her, butter) face.”
Basically, it means a girl with a sexually attractive body but a less-attractive face. So of course I put the link to “butter face” definition in my Gchat away message with some grumbly comment about the obnoxiousness of the phrase.
But then a male friend IMed me to say, “Simmer down, that’s not sexist! ‘Butterface’ just means the same thing as calling a man ‘ugly.’” But really, it doesn’t! “Ugly” can apply to both men and women, but “butterface” labels a woman only by her appearance. Men are always going to assess women’s face, legs, ass, boobs—that’s just what healthy human sexual attraction is. But labeling her based on what he considers to be her worst feature is just mean and nasty. It’s crueler still because there is no male equivalent.
A condom by any other name — prophylactic, jimmy hat, raincoat, love glove, Trojan — is still a condom. But aren’t nicknames more fun? Personally, we like “French letters,” a British term, coined around 1856, which is even in the dictionary, making it totally legit. (We don’t actually call them that. We have enough problems getting dates.) But now we might have to start calling them “Nepalese letters” because women in mountain villages over there have started mailing condoms to their husbands who are working overseas. You know, “Please don’t sleep around, honey, but if you’re going to, slip one of these on, you lying, cheating scumbag.” Keep reading »
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