The Oxford Dictionary of New Words

Environment, is today expected to warn high-spending councils that he is ready to take tough new action to stamp out 'creative accounting'.

The Times 21 Nov. 1986, p. 2

cred° noun (Youth Culture)

In young people's slang: credibility, reputation, peer status.

Etymology: Formed by abbreviating credibility to its first syllable.

History and Usage: The emphasis on cred in the early nineties arises from the concept of street credibility which developed at the very end of the seventies. Street credibility (which by the early eighties was being abbreviated to street cred) originally involved popularity with, and accessibility to, members of the urban street culture, who were seen as representing ordinary people. Before long, though, the term had come to mean familiarity with contemporary fashions--or the extent to which a person was 'hip'. Once the concept was established, the word street was often dropped, leaving cred alone.

'Cred' was achieved by your rhetorical stance and no one had more credibility than the Clash.

Bob Geldof Is That It? (1986), p. 125

'They've got to have total cred,' Boxall insisted, when listing the special qualities he is looking for [in a magazine editor].

Sydney Morning Herald 1 Feb. 1990, p. 28

credý noun (Business World)

In colloquial use (originally in the US): financial credit.

Etymology: Formed by abbreviating credit to its first syllable.

History and Usage: A natural development in view of the boom in the use of credit facilities during the late seventies and

inexplicably flattened, apparently by a swirling, vortex-like movement.

Etymology: Formed by compounding: a circle of flattened crop.

History and Usage: The puzzling phenomenon of crop circles (sometimes also called corn circles) has been perplexing scientists for about a decade. Since the early eighties increasing numbers of circles and other patterns have been reported in areas as far apart as the South of England, the farming belt of the US, and Australia, often appearing overnight. A number of theories--ranging from meteorological changes or fungi to alien spaceships or the activity of hoaxers--have been put forward to explain them, but none has been conclusive.

They are the result not of the supernatural but of an everyday, common garden variety of fungi, according to biologists Mr Michael Hall and Mr Andrew Macara, who have been conducting a study into the crop circle conundrum.

Sunday Telegraph 11 Mar. 1990, p. 5

Could the enormous increase in the perplexing crop circles be anything to do with the Earth's vital energies?

Kindred Spirit Summer 1990, p. 26

crossover noun and adjective Sometimes written cross-over (Music) (People and Society)

noun: The process of moving from one culture (or especially from one musical genre) to another; something or someone that has done this (specifically, a musical act or artist that has moved from a specialized appeal in one limited area of music into the general popular-music charts).

adjective: (Of a person) that has made this transition from one culture or genre to another; (of music, an act, etc.) appealing to a wide audience outside its genre, sometimes by mixing musical styles.

It showed the group making the crossover from deft-but-faceless R&B outfit to 'far out' funkers.

Q Dec. 1989, p. 169

Blame prefigured what fashion mood critics would soon call 'crossover culture'--the white mainstream's fresh infatuation with black style.

Vogue Sept. 1990, p. 87

crucial adjective (Youth Culture)

In young people's slang: very good or important, great, fantastic.

Etymology: An example of the way in which meaning is weakened and trivialized in the idiom of young people: compare ace, awesome, and rad.

History and Usage: Crucial belongs to the slang usage of the very young (largely the pre-teenage group) in the late eighties. It was popularized especially by children's television presenters and other media personalities, notably the comedian

Lenny Henry, who devoted a whole book to the subject. As often happens with such slang words, the respectability which crucial gained by being used in print caused it to go out of fashion rather among the youngsters who were using it.

Martha (aged seven): 'Lenny Henry, he wrote the "guide to cruciality", so we don't say crucial no more.'

New Statesman 16 Feb. 1990, p. 12

The very latest buzz-word, after last year's favourite sayings like 'mental, mental', 'crucial' and 'wicked', is 'raw'.

Daily Star 20 Mar. 1990, p. 13

I have worn out three sets of trainers running around telling my friends how crucial Young Eye is.

Private Eye 26 Oct. 1990, p. 21

cruelty-free

adjective (Environment)

Of cosmetics and other goods: not tested (or only minimally tested) on animals during development; produced ostensibly without involving any cruelty to animals.

Etymology: For etymology, see -free.

History and Usage: This is a term which started to appear in the late eighties as a natural consequence of the increasingly

well-publicized animal liberation movement--a movement whose arguments seemed to get a more sympathetic hearing once green views in general became acceptable. Cruelty-free often appears on the labels of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and other everyday products which have hitherto been routinely tested on laboratory animals but are now produced without actual cruelty (although the interpretation of 'actual cruelty' evidently still varies); vegetarians also sometimes use it to refer to animal-free food products.

Mary Bonner showed over 50 people how enjoyable a cruelty-free Christmas can be with her celebration roast, mushroom stuffing and red wine sauce, vegan Christmas Cake and mince pies.

Vegetarian Mar./Apr. 1988, p. 42

Pamphlets that bring news of...where they can purchase 'cruelty-free' soaps and shampoos.

Forbes 20 Mar. 1989, p. 44

crumblie noun (People and Society) (Youth Culture)

In young people's slang: an old or senile person (older than a wrinklie).

Etymology: Formed by treating a figurative sense of the adjective as a noun; the metaphor relies on the assumption among the young that all elderly people will eventually 'crack up' and

become senile. This process of crumbling, they suppose, is the natural next step after going wrinkly.

History and Usage: Used mainly by children and teenagers from about the late seventies, and apparently limited to British English.

The growing fashion among teenagers is to describe their parents as 'wrinklies' and their grandparents as 'crumblies'. A reader, however, tells me how she countered this when...she described her own children, in their earshot, as 'pimplies'.

Daily Telegraph 26 Jan. 1987, p. 17

cryocombining form (Health and Fitness) (Science and Technology)

Widely used in compounds relating to extreme cold, especially when this is an artificial means of preserving tissue.

Etymology: From the Greek kruos 'frost, icy cold'.

History and Usage: Early words formed with this combining form concerned temperatures not much below the freezing point of water. However, as it became possible to create lower and lower temperatures artificially, cryocame to be associated with the

sort of intense cold that could only be achieved with the aid of 'cold-creating' or cryogenic equipment, such as apparatus for liquefying nitrogen or other gases. During the sixties and seventies the creation of such temperatures began to find applications in electronics and surgery: below a certain point some materials become superconductors, that is to say they lose all electrical resistance, which makes them very useful in a wide range of applications (in brilliant pebbles, for example), while cryosurgery uses intense cold to remove or destroy tissue just as effectively as heat. Until the late seventies cryonics

(or cryopreservation), the use of extreme cold to preserve living tissue, had remained at an experimental stage because of the tendency of water to expand when frozen--making the formation of ice crystals within living cells lethally damaging.

However, study of the few animals which can survive freezing led to the development of substances which circumvent some of the problems (cryoprotectants). During the eighties it became

underline or rectangle) which shows where the next character will appear or the next action will take effect, and which can usually be moved about by using a cursor key on the keyboard or a mouse.

Etymology: From Latin cursor 'runner' (the agent-noun formed on the verb currere 'to run'). When first used in English (until

the middle of the seventeenth century) the word meant a runner or messenger; it then came to be used for a part of a

mathematical instrument, etc. that moved backwards and forwards (for example, the transparent slide with a hair-line which forms part of a slide-rule). It was a logical step to its present use

in the computer age, since it is the cursor which 'runs' round the screen.

History and Usage: The first uses of the word cursor in computer technology are associated with the development of a mouse in the mid sixties, although the idea had been invented (and described using other names such as marker) by John Lentz of IBM in the fifties. Even though the cursor had first been thought of in connection with mouse technology, the principle of having a cursor which was controlled using keys on the keyboard was well-established in home computing in the late seventies,

before windows and mice (see WIMPý) became widespread. With the increased popularity of home computing and word-processing in

the eighties, cursor has passed from the technical vocabulary into everyday currency.

cutting edge

(Science and Technology) see leading edge