The Oxford Dictionary of New Words
.pdfsurprisingly, though, it was hailed by the media and the public-at-large as the long-awaited end to all dieting for those with a weight problem and little will-power.
She says he recommended a tummy tuck for her overhanging stomach and liposuction for her legs, bra line and chin.
New Age (Melbourne) 16 Aug. 1986, p. 25
The liposuction that promises to suck bodies into shape carries the risks of all general anesthesia.
Philadelphia Inquirer 20 Sept. 1989, section A, p. 17
For a consultation on...spot fat reduction (Liposuction) call us on the number below.
Vogue Sept. 1990, p. 432
listener-friendly
(Lifestyle and Leisure) see friendly
little devil
(Drugs) see basuco
liveware (Science and Technology) see -ware
living will
noun (People and Society)
A document written by a person while still legally fit to do so, requesting that he or she should be allowed to die rather than be kept alive by artificial means if subsequently severely disabled or suffering from a terminal illness; a request for euthanasia.
Etymology: Formed by compounding: a kind of will dealing specifically with an individual's understanding of what constitutes worthwhile living.
History and Usage: The concept of the living will was first discussed in legal circles in the US in the late sixties; the coinage is claimed by an American lawyer, Luis Kutner. The
documents themselves acquired legal status in several States during the seventies, and by the end of the eighties most States in the US recognized them. In the UK there was little mention of the living will until the end of the eighties and the legal force of these documents has not yet been fully tested in the courts.
Henry Campbell discovered he had Aids in 1984. That year, after two major bouts of pneumonia, he drew up a living will.
Independent 18 May 1990, p. 19
12.5 LMS
LMS |
abbreviation (People and Society) |
Short for local management of schools, a system set up by the Education Reform Act of 1988, providing for a large proportion of the financial and administrative management of state schools in the UK to become the responsibility of the governors and head teacher respectively.
Etymology: The initial letters of Local Management of Schools.
History and Usage: The Act set out the two basic principles of applying formula funding to all primary and secondary schools, based on the need to spend, and of handing over budgetary control to the governors of schools over a certain size; funding was to be linked to pupil numbers, giving schools an incentive to attract and retain pupils. It did not, however, introduce the
terms local management of schools or LMS--these terms came in a Coopers & Lybrand report on the scheme, published in January 1988:
The changes require a new culture and philosophy of the organisation of education at the school level. They are more than purely financial; they need a general shift in management. We use the term 'Local Management of Schools' (LMS).
From here the phrase was taken up in a Department of Education
and Science circular, and soon became institutionalized. The idea had its origins in an experiment carried out in a village school in Cambridgeshire in the early eighties; at that time the
scheme was known as Local Financial Management (LFM). The main consequence of LMS itself was that, for the first time, many
schools' budgets would be controlled by the governors, who would also become the employer of all the school staff. The role of
the head teacher centred on the day-to-day management of the school. Each Local Education Authority had to devise and submit its own scheme for approval; most had done this by 1991, but the Inner London schemes were left for approval and implementation later.
The key to future waves of opting out...lies in the Act's provisions for local management of schools
(LMS)...Heads and governors operating LMS will control 90 per cent of their budgets, increase their funds on
the basis of the number of pupils they attract and have power to hire and fire staff.
Daily Telegraph 23 Feb. 1989, p. 15
12.6 lock...
lock |
(Lifestyle and Leisure) (Youth Culture) see break-dancing |
logic bomb
noun (Science and Technology)
A set of instructions surreptitiously included in a computer program such that if a particular set of conditions ever occurs, the instructions will be put into operation (usually with disastrous results).
Etymology: Formed by compounding: the equivalent of a time bomb, metaphorically speaking, except that it is a particular set of circumstances built into the logic of the program, rather than the passage of time, that will set it off. A similar set of instructions designed to be implemented on a given date is in
fact called a time bomb in computing but the distinction between the two terms is not always clearly made.
History and Usage: The logic bomb is one of a number of malicious or even criminal uses of computing know-how that have been invented since computers became widely accessible and affordable in the second half of the seventies. It has been used
as a way of destroying evidence of a computer fraud as soon as information which might lead to the culprits is accessed, as the basis for blackmail, and as a way for a programmer to take revenge on an employer by causing the system to crash mysteriously.
If you damage someone's computer--whether by attacking it with a hammer or crippling the program with a logic bomb--it's...a crime.
Independent 21 Sept. 1988, p. 2
Slip a logic bomb into the development software; it'll be copied along with the valid programs and shipped to the rest of the country.
Clifford Stoll The Cuckoo's Egg (1989), p. 232
See also Trojan, virus, and worm
loopy dust
(Drugs) see angel dust
lose one's bottle see bottle
low-alcohol beer
(Lifestyle and Leisure) see nab
low observable technology
(War and Weaponry) see Stealth
low-tech (Science and Technology) see high-tech
12.7 LRINF
LRINF (War and Weaponry) see INF
12.8 luggable...
luggable adjective and noun (Science and Technology)
adjective: Of a computer: rather larger than a portable; light and small enough to be carried short distances with some effort.
noun: A computer which is not quite small enough to be easily portable.
Etymology: Formed by adding the suffix -able to the verb lug 'carry (something heavy)', after the model of portable.
History and Usage: One of a series of terms for different sizes of personal computer which came into the language during the first half of the eighties. Luggable was originally used to
refer to the PC which had been made rather lighter than usual to allow it to be moved about from one location to another; as such, it was still in a distinct category from the portable
laptop (which had an LCD screen and was not dependent on mains power). With the development of ever smaller computers in the second half of the eighties (see the examples listed under
laptop) came smaller and lighter luggables--of about twenty rather than thirty pounds--without which the maufacturers would have been unable to compete successfully in the microcomputer market.
The success of these 30lb 'luggables', as they are more appropriately known, owes more to their wide range of software...than to their ease of carting about.
Sunday Times 26 Aug. 1984, p. 49
At a time when portables are getting smaller and lighter, IBM has come up with a mains luggable the size of a small suitcase and weighing some 20lb.
PC Magazine July 1989, p. 46
lunchbox (Science and Technology) see laptop
12.9 Lyme disease...
Lyme disease
noun (Health and Fitness)
A form of arthritis which mainly affects the large joints, is preceded by a rash, and is thought to be transmitted by a bacterium carried by deer ticks.
Etymology: Formed from the name of the town of Lyme, Connecticut (where the first outbreak occurred in 1975) and disease.
History and Usage: Lyme disease, at first called Lyme arthritis in the medical literature, caused much concern in the US during the late seventies and eighties and was identified in British patients as well in the mid eighties.
The ticks feed on small mammals and birds, and in their adult stage, on deer, but not all deer ticks are
infected with Lyme disease. In order to become carriers of Lyme disease, they must first feed on an animal which already has the spirochete.
Madison Eagle (New Jersey) 3 May 1990, p. 5
lymphadenopathy syndrome (Health and Fitness) see Aids
13.0M
13.1McGuffin...
McGuffin noun Also written MacGuffin (Lifestyle and Leisure)
A device used in a film or work of fiction whereby some fact or activity seems all-important to the characters involved while actually only providing an excuse for the plot as a whole; the thing which absorbs the characters and misleads the audience in this way.
Etymology: The word was invented by the film director Alfred Hitchcock in the thirties in relation to the film The
Thirty-Nine Steps; when interviewed by Fran‡ois Truffaut in the sixties, he claimed that he always liked to use a McGuffin in
his films:
The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin. So the 'MacGuffin' is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn't matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it's beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the
picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they're of no importance whatsoever.
The word itself may be derived from guff; it was apparently borrowed from a Scottish joke involving a man carrying a mysterious parcel on a train; but the joke may also be a McGuffin in its own right.
History and Usage: Although Hitchcock had been using the word for several decades, McGuffin did not start to appear more widely in film criticism until the early eighties, when it
suddenly acquired a more general currency, and was used to refer to the underlying impetus for the plot of novels and television series as well as horror films.
There's a funny scene in which Wilder, looking for a gold coin--the film's McGuffin--ventures into the bathroom of a beautiful woman villain and encounters her in the shower.
Sydney Morning Herald 27 July 1989, p. 14
Maddeningly, neither the deal nor its unmaking are anything but McGuffins in this misfiring comedy.
Los Angeles Times 22 June 1990, section F, p. 6
McKenzie noun (People and Society)
In the UK, a person who attends a court of law to help and advise one of the parties to the case. Often used attributively, especially in McKenzie friend or McKenzie man.
Etymology: Named after the case of McKenzie v. McKenzie (1970), in which the precedent was set for a non-professional helper to
be allowed in court.
History and Usage: According to the Law Reports on the case of McKenzie v. McKenzie,
Any person, whether he be a professional man or not, may attend a trial as a friend of either party, may take
notes, and may quietly make suggestions and give advice to that party.
During the seventies these people were generally called McKenzies or McKenzie men in legal journals and the like, but the term had little currency outside legal sources. In the early eighties greater use was made of the precedent by people who wanted to do without legal representation or who could not afford it, and the terms started to appear in the newspapers; by the end of the decade the preferred form in this more popular usage was clearly McKenzie friend.
Mr Dave Nellist, MP for Coventry South-East, said he intended to appear before Coventry magistrates as a 'McKenzie friend'.
Daily Telegraph 24 July 1990, p. 2
13.2 mad cow disease...
mad cow disease
(Health and Fitness)
Colloquially, BSE.
Etymology: So nicknamed because the disease affects the brain and central nervous system of the infected cows, causing them to stagger, fall down, or generally behave as though deranged.
History and Usage: For history, see BSE. Although only a popular nickname for the disease (originally popularized by journalists), mad cow disease came to be used in a number of reputable sources without inverted commas. It caught the popular imagination to such an extent that a number of humorous variations were coined during 1989 and 1990; most were one-off instances like the examples printed below, but mad bull disease (making use of the pun with the stock-market concept of bullishness) cropped up quite frequently in financial reports. Mad cow disease itself is sometimes shortened to mad cow.
Fresh call for bigger 'mad cow' payouts.
headline in The Times 6 Feb. 1990, p. 6
The process could be accelerated...with salmonella infection on the increase and the frightening spectre of mad cow disease crossing the species barrier.
Health Guardian May/June 1990, p. 1
Fears are growing that the continuing--perhaps worsening--problems associated with mad cow disease could accelerate what many regard as an alarming drift from the land.
Guardian 9 June 1990, p. 4
School BSE, or mad classroom disease, exists largely as a result of the ridiculous notion that a teacher's
primary duty is to make lessons interesting.
Daily Telegraph 21 June 1990, p. 14
What we have here is a bompin' stompin' monsta groova, a toe tanglin', heart manglin', floor fanglin' 125 bananas
per minute of sheer joy--mad fruit disease in the area.
Sounds 28 July 1990, p. 24
Madrid conditions
noun (Business World) (Politics)
The set of conditions (laid down by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the European summit held in Madrid in June 1989) for the entry of the UK into full participation in EMS.
Etymology: Formed by compounding: conditions laid down at Madrid.
History and Usage: Mrs Thatcher had claimed for some considerable time before the Madrid summit of June 1989 that the pound would join the ERM (the exchange-rate mechanism at the heart of EMS: see the entry for EMS) 'when the time is ripe'. It was in the Madrid conditions that she first stated explicitly
when she thought that would be. The conditions covered five areas, the most important of which was that UK inflation must first be brought down to a level near to the average in other EC countries. In fact, when her Chancellor, John Major, took the UK into the ERM in October 1990, this condition had not been met--a circumstance which gave rise to much discussion of the Madrid conditions in the media. The other four conditions were that France and Italy should abolish exchange controls, that the
single internal market of the EC should first be completed, that there should be progress towards a free market in financial services, and that competition policy should be reinforced.
Last week the Chancellor, more cautious than the Foreign Secretary, but working with him, set out his stall. He stressed the importance of completing the 1992 single market and other Madrid conditions.
Guardian 19 June 1990, p. 6
magalog noun Also written magalogue (Business World)
A marketing publication issued periodically and combining features of the glossy magazine with characteristics of a mail-order catalogue.
Etymology: Formed by telescoping magazine and catalogue (or, in the US, catalog) to make a blend. The same principle was followed in the formation of Specialog(ue), the trade mark of a type of specialized catalogue.