The Oxford Dictionary of New Words
.pdfmechatronics
noun (Science and Technology)
A technology (originally from Japan) which combines mechanical engineering with electronics, mainly so as to increase
automation in manufacturing industries.
Etymology: Formed by putting together the first two syllables of mechanics and the last two of electronics.
History and Usage: The word first started to appear in English-language sources in the early eighties in descriptions of Japan's pioneering work in the field. Often mechatronics involves developing robots to carry out very precise manufacturing tasks, and this is probably what most people in English-speaking countries think of as mechatronics, especially in relation to car assembly; however, the word can be applied to many different aspects of the manufacturing process. It is nearly always a way of reducing the human workforce, and is therefore an important economic consideration for any industry.
Renault's contribution to the new generation of systems now being developed lies in three areas: 'mechatronics', communications and signal processing. Mechatronics embraces the use of the latest combination of electronics, mechanical and electrical engineering and allied technologies to develop new, functional systems for the auto industry.
Scientific American Dec. 1984, section A, p. 14
Australia's leading roboticists are gathering in Perth this week...Our Mechatronics section next week will report on this important meeting.
The Australian 13 May 1986, p. 23
An unattended operation requires the construction of a computer control system and the introduction of technology related to mechatronics and robots.
The Times 20 May 1986, p. 32
mecu |
(Business World) see ecu |
meeja |
noun Also written meejah or meejer (Lifestyle and Leisure) |
In humorous or dismissive use in UK slang: the media; journalists and media people collectively.
Etymology: A respelling of media, meant to represent a common colloquial pronunciation of the word.
History and Usage: A form which first cropped up in the early eighties, meeja (along with its variants) became increasingly common as the decade progressed. This was perhaps partly a result of public debate about the role of the media (especially the intrusion of journalists from the popular press into people's private lives), and the generally high profile of media 'personalities'.
The British public, whose contempt for politicians rivals that for the meejer.
Spectator 25 July 1987, p. 7
We aren't middle-class poor anymore, you know. I am part of the rich meeja.
Janet Neel Death's Bright Angel (1988), p. 41
mega |
adjective (Lifestyle and Leisure) (Youth Culture) |
Colloquially, very large or important; on a grand scale; great.
Etymology: From the Greek megas 'great'. The adjective was probably formed because the combining form mega- (as in megastar and megastore) was sometimes written as a free-standing element (mega star, etc.), which later came to be interpreted as a word
in its own right. This process is not uncommon with Latin and Greek combining forms: see ecoand Euro-, and compare pseudo, which has been used as a free-standing adjective for several decades.
History and Usage: Mega has been in colloquial use, especially
in the entertainment industry, since at least the beginning of the eighties. At first it was used mainly in variations on
megastar and megastore (describing a person as a mega bore or a development as a mega project). By the middle of the decade it had also started to be used predicatively (as in 'that's mega').
In the business world, any transaction involving large sums of money (millions of dollars) can be described as mega; mega bid, mega deal, and mega merger are all in use, sometimes written solid (and therefore probably based on the combining form rather than the adjective). By the end of the eighties, mega had been taken up as a favourite term of approval among young people, with a weakening of sense to 'very good' (a similar story to
that of great two decades previously).
I was mega, but not mega enough for the job.
New Yorker 25 Mar. 1985, p. 41
The insurance companies helped promote the industry as a whole with their mega launches and promotions.
Investors Chronicle 8 Jan. 1988, p. 28
I got the gabardine there. I must say that I think that it's absolutely mega. I got it in Auntie Hilda's shop--for a quid. I'm afraid she doesn't have much concept of the value of stylish clothes.
Guardian 3 Aug. 1989, p. 34
megaflop noun (Science and Technology)
In computing jargon, a processing speed of a million floating-point operations per second.
Etymology: Formed from the combining form megain its usual sense in units of measurement, 'a million times', and a
'singular' form of the acronym FLOPS, 'floating-point operations per second' (the s being dropped as though it were there to mark the plural form of a regular noun flop).
History and Usage: A term which has been used in computing circles since the second half of the seventies, and is now also
found in less technical sources. A measure of the speed at which the field develops is that the computing world talks of today's supercomputers' speeds in terms of gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second), and tomorrow's in teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second).
The Cray 2 has busted out of the 'megaflop' realm, where speed is measured in millions of 'flops'--floating-point operations per second. Its peak speed is 1.2 billion
flops, or gigaflops.
Business Week 26 Aug. 1985, p. 92
The TC2000 can have up to 504 processors, providing 9,576 mips (millions of instructions per second) or 10,080 megaflops (floating-point operations per second). Prices start at $350,000.
Guardian 27 July 1989, p. 25
megastar noun (Lifestyle and Leisure)
A performer or media 'personality' who has achieved fame and fortune on a very large scale and enjoys the publicity and lavish lifestyle that go with stardom; a star who is considered greater even than a superstar.
Etymology: Formed from the combining form mega- (from Greek megas 'great') and star.
History and Usage: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the entertainment industry produced stars; between the twenties and the seventies some were great enough to be called superstars; by the late seventies and early eighties, the next step on the ladder of increasing media hype was to call
them megastars. Some of the ingredients of megastardom seem to be international renown, perhaps in more than one medium (especially films and television), great wealth and extravagance of lifestyle, and a vigorous publicity machine to keep the
glitzy image in the public eye. The Australian comedian Barry Humphries, in his role as Dame Edna Everage, has done much to popularize--and at the same time to debunk--the concept of the megastar on television.
Elton--born Reginald Kenneth Dwight--did not, as Jagger and Lennon did, become a tax exile and disappear off into megastardom.
Independent Magazine 11 Feb. 1989, p. 23
Sometimes, when I'm doing my shows, I see people in the audience slipping from their seats into a kneeling position and I say, 'Get up! Off your knees! Back into your seat!' After all, I'm just a megastar, no more than that. I'm frail. I have my weaknesses. Above all, I want
to show my human side.
'Dame Edna' in She Oct. 1990, p. 116
megastore noun (Lifestyle and Leisure)
A very large store, usually situated on the outskirts of a town or city, provided with its own parking facilities, and often selling goods from its own factory direct to the customer.
Etymology: Formed from the combining form mega- (as in the entry above) and store.
History and Usage: The original idea of the warehouse-style megastore was that people could bring their own transport and buy furniture, do-it-yourself equipment, electrical goods, etc. direct from the manufacturer. This has been practised in the UK since the late sixties or seventies, but many such outlets were
at first called warehouses. The name megastore was popularized throughout the world by Richard Branson's Virgin chain in the mid eighties, but this time it simply referred to a very large retail outlet. In the late eighties, the megastore in the US and the UK tended to be a large retail store bringing together many different kinds of goods under one roof.
Walk into any of the new megastores now sprouting up--themselves a new way of consuming pop, a far cry from the listening booths or record counters of yesteryear--you will find an immense variety of music from the last forty years on offer.
New Statesman 4 July 1986, p. 26
Richard Branson...will arrive in Sydney tomorrow to open his first Australian 'megastore' next week...The store,
at Darling Harbour, is billed as Australia's biggest record shop.
Sydney Morning Herald 28 Apr. 1988, p. 6
mellow out intransitive verb
In US slang (especially in California): to relax; to release one's tensions and inhibitions; to become 'laid-back'.
Etymology: Formed by adding out to the verb mellow in its figurative sense 'to soften, become toned down or subdued'; as is often the case in these US phrasal verbs with out, there is strong influence from the slang use of the first word in another part of speech. In this case, mellow had been used as a fashionable adjective in Californian slang for several decades in the sense 'feeling good and relaxed after smoking marijuana': to mellow out is therefore to reproduce this feeling in oneself (though not necessarily by using drugs).
History and Usage: The phrasal verb has been used in US slang since the mid seventies; during the eighties, American television series made it a familiar expression to viewers in other countries too, although most British English speakers would only use it in parody of Californian speech. The adjective mellowed out is also sometimes found. So prevalent is the word mellow in its various guises in Californian speech that in the late seventies the cartoonist Garry Trudeau coined the word mellowspeak to describe this particular variety of English; the word has survived and extended its meaning to any bland, laid-back, or jargon-ridden language.
He's getting it all together at last, mellowing out (in the jargon).
Susan Trott When Your Lover Leaves (1980), p. 75
'You told me on the phone that the highest rock climb
would be 15 feet.' 'Ah, I did?' he said in his most mellowed-out tones. 'Well, it was no problem, really, eh? You did fine.'
Sports Illustrated 16 May 1988, p. 12
meltdown noun (Business World)
A disastrous and uncontrolled event with far-reaching repercussions; especially in financial jargon, an uncontrolled rapid fall in share values, a crash.
Etymology: A figurative application of meltdown in its nuclear physics sense, 'the melting of the core of a nuclear
reactor'--an event which, once started, cannot easily be controlled, and which causes widespread destruction and contamination.
History and Usage: This figurative sense arose in the US in the mid eighties after the Three Mile Island accident, and was reinforced by the near meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986. In the financial world, it was applied especially to the stock market crash of October 1987, when dramatic falls in share values on Wall Street had
repercussions in all the world markets. Monday 19 October 1987 was given the nickname Meltdown Monday (but see also Black Monday). Meltdown is now used in more trivial contexts as well, with a weakening of meaning to 'slump, failure'.
The rapidly growing international hotels group, Queens Moat Houses, yesterday asked its shareholders to dip into their pockets for the third time since Meltdown Monday, to help pay for further expansion.
Guardian 17 Aug. 1989, p. 12
The Expos...suffered another meltdown and sank to fourth place.
New Yorker 11 Dec. 1989, p. 74
Smarties-to-coffee giant Nestle disappointed chocoholics with a 5% meltdown in its half-way profits.
Today 15 Sept. 1990, p. 35
metal |
(Music) (Youth Culture) see heavy metal |
Mexican wave
noun Sometimes in the form Mexico wave (Business World) (Lifestyle and Leisure)
A rising-and-falling effect which ripples successively across different sections of a crowd; also, a similar effect in the movement of statistics etc.
Etymology: The effect, which looks like a moving wave, was so named because it was first widely publicized by television pictures of sports crowds doing it at the World Cup football competition in Mexico City in 1986.
History and Usage: The Mexican wave was apparently first practised (under the name human wave) by American football crowds in the early eighties; the crowd in the grandstand expresses appreciation of what is happening in the match by standing up one lateral section at a time, raising their arms, and then sitting down again as the next section rises. When this was done at Mexico City, it was seen on television by millions of people and later widely copied. The figurative use of the term is very recent, and perhaps unlikely to survive.
Play was first delayed when another rendition of the Mexican wave, that mental aberration which cricket should long have discouraged, was accompanied by a confetti storm of torn-up paper.
The Times 12 June 1989, p. 46
Unlike the crash in 1987 and the mini crash last October
the Mexican wave effect, by which market movements sweep around the globe from Tokyo to Hong Kong to London to Wall Street, has failed to materialise.
Guardian 26 Apr. 1990, p. 11
mezzanine adjective (Business World)
In financial jargon: representing an intermediate form of finance, debt, etc. between two more established or traditional ones. Used especially in:
mezzanine debt, debt consisting of unsecured loans (intermediate between secured loans and equity), usually as a component of a management or leveraged buyout (compare junk debt at junk bond);
mezzanine finance (or funding), either the financing of a leveraged buyout using subordinated or unsecured debt or, in companies financed by venture capital, the final round of funding before the company's public flotation (intermediate in seniority between the venture capital financing and bank financing).
Etymology: A figurative use of mezzanine, which was originally a noun meaning 'a storey of a building between two others', but which was so commonly used attributively (in mezzanine floor etc.) that it came to be reinterpreted as an adjective meaning 'intermediate between two floors or levels'.
History and Usage: The fashion for mezzanine finance arose in US financial markets in the late seventies or early eighties,
and was widely discussed when financier Michael Milken of investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert persuaded institutional investors to take the risk of junk bonds in return for the high yield that they offered. In 1983 the Charterhouse Group launched a Mezzanine Fund specifically to provide the mezzanine finance for corporate buyouts. In some of its uses, mezzanine is simply
a more official synonym for junk.
Others, such as Seragen in Hopkinton, Mass., raised seed money easily but now find venture capitalists 'more discriminating' when investing in a 'mezzanine', or
third, funding round.
Scientific American June 1988, p. 92
The Citicorp fund will be dollar-based and provide mezzanine debt for deals led by the group both inside and outside the United States.
Daily Telegraph 16 Aug. 1988, p. 21
13.6 microwave...
microwave verb and adjective (Lifestyle and Leisure)
transitive or intransitive verb: To cook (food) in a microwave oven; to be suitable for or undergo microwave cooking.
adjective: (Of food or food containers) intended for cooking in a microwave oven; microwavable.
Etymology: Formed by changing the grammatical function of microwave, originally the name of the type of electromagnetic wave which is passed through the food to cook it; by the mid seventies, though, it was already being used widely as a short name for a microwave oven.
History and Usage: Microwave ovens were in widespread use in the US by the late sixties and in the UK by the seventies; the development of a verb meaning 'to cook by microwaves or in a microwave oven' was to be expected as soon as the cooker had become a standard household item, and in fact the earliest uses of the verb date from the mid seventies. The regular adjective
for food which has been cooked in this way is microwaved. During the early eighties, a number of food and cookware manufacturers started to describe their products as microwavable (or microwaveable), but in speech most people described them simply as microwave; this informal use eventually also found its way
into print and is occasionally used as a synonym for microwaved, too.
He went to the pub and had a microwave mince and onion pie and crinkle-cut chips.
Sue Townsend The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984), p. 59
When cooking or reheating: food should be very hot throughout--when you take it out of a conventional oven, or after standing times when microwaving, it should be too hot to eat immediately.