The Oxford Dictionary of New Words

shoplifting since the end of the seventies; usually they take the form of a heavy plastic label which must be detached from

the goods by a shop assistant using a special machine before the goods can be removed from the shop without setting off an alarm. Similar tags for people had been tried in mental institutions in the US during the sixties. In the late eighties this idea was extended to prisoners and people on parole. In this tagging system a small electronic beacon was attached by a band to the person's wrist or ankle; the signals from the beacon could be monitored by a central computer so that the whereabouts of any person wearing the tag (also known as an offender's tag) would always be known.

A determined-enough shoplifter can remove any electronic tag--but not readily. Tags have been found gnawed in

half and left bloodied on fitting-room floors.

Fortune 25 Feb. 1980, p. 115

The tag, designed for the petty criminal, can be fitted to the leg, neck or wrist. It is controlled by a central computer, which rings the offender at home at random intervals.

The Times 9 Feb. 1988, p. 5

The latest statistics point to a majority of people working with offenders as being in favour of tagging as a potential reducer of the prison population and hence of crime.

Daily Telegraph 20 Dec. 1989, p. 14

In hip hop culture,

noun: A graffito, usually consisting of a decorated nickname, word, or initial, made by a graffiti artist as a personal 'signature'.

transitive verb: To decorate (a place or object) with graffiti; to leave (one's graffiti signature) in a public place.

Etymology: Another figurative use of tag in the sense of 'label'.

History and Usage: Graffiti tags first started to appear in the streets of New York during the first half of the seventies, but the practice of tagging did not spread far outside large American cities until the mid eighties. Then it was the popularization of hip-hop culture as a whole that involved youngsters outside the US in constructing these highly decorated nicknames, often on very visible public buildings. The person who paints a tag is known as a tagger; graffiti artists often

work in teams or crews and a particular tag can belong to a tag team or tag crew rather than to an individual tag artist. A more elaborate graffito is known as a piece (short for masterpiece).

The proliferation of 'writing'...along with its spectacular development from scrawled felt-tip 'tags' on city walls to spray-can 'pieces'...has been a visible

part of New York's daily life.

New Yorker 26 Mar. 1984, p. 98

Vandals have imported graffiti materials from America to ape New York 'tag teams'--gangs who vie to leave their personal trademarks in daring or eye-catching places.

Daily Telegraph 3 May 1990, p. 4

talkline (People and Society) see -line

tamper intransitive verb (Lifestyle and Leisure) (People and Society)

To interfere with the packaging of consumer goods, especially so as to engage in consumer terrorism. Used especially to form compound adjectives:

tamper-evident, of the packaging of foodstuffs, medicines, etc.: having a visible seal or other device which makes obvious any opening of the packet between manufacture and sale;

tamper-resistant, so constructed as to make tampering with the product difficult or impossible.

History and Usage: The search for tamper-resistant packaging, especially to prevent young children from harming themselves by mistaking adult medicines for sweets, had already been going on for some time before the first major case of consumer terrorism in the US in 1982. In this incident, cyanide was added to the contents of Tylenol pain-killing capsules and several people were killed after taking them. Later in the eighties, consumer terrorists tampered with baby foods and other foodstuffs in the US and the UK. This new area of crime led to the concept of tamper-evident packaging, incorporating some feature (such as shrink-wrapping or a seal which changed colour on contact with the air) to make it obvious if the package had been opened since leaving the factory.

He said the firm had been checking products item by item since the first Tylenol poisonings in the fall of 1982,

but that it 'quickened' its pace to put tamper-evident packaging on its products in the wake of the second Tylenol poisoning incident earlier this year.

Chicago Tribune 2 May 1986, p. 2

Tankie noun Also written Tanky (Politics)

In British slang, a hard-line Communist who unquestioningly supports Soviet policies.

Etymology: Said to be so named because of the Tankies' reluctance to condemn Soviet military intervention (tanks) in Afghanistan (or, long before that, in Czechoslovakia).

History and Usage: The split of British Communism into a Eurocommunist (see Euro°) and a Sovietist or Tankie branch dates from the second half of the seventies, although the dismissive nickname Tankie did not start to appear in print until the mid eighties. The hard-line Tankies were associated particularly

with the Morning Star newspaper by users of the nickname.

The New Communist Party of Britain, the Battersea Sovietist splinter off the old bloc, has issued this guidance to the world's press. 'Please do not describe the NCP as "Stalinists" or "Tankies"...If you insist on

The endemic mistrust of dance music that makes it a rock and roll island also means that the new noises of the Eighties--hip hop, house, techno et al--have been, at

best ignored, at worst patronised.

The Face June 1990, p. 48

Marillion with Hogarth are now a band, not four musicians playing backing to a rampant ego, and the only 'old' track that survives the transition to embryonic techno rock band is the excellent 'Freaks'.

Sounds 28 July 1990, p. 34

technobabble

(Science and Technology) see -babble

technopunk

(Lifestyle and Leisure) see cyberpunk

technostress

noun Also written techno-stress (Health and Fitness)

Stress arising from working in a technological environment (especially with computer technology); a psychiatric illness whose main cause is difficulty in adapting to new technology.

Etymology: Formed from techno- (the combining form of technological) and stress.

History and Usage: Technostress was first identified in the US in the mid eighties, as people's working environments were changed out of all recognition by the technological revolution. In 1984 US psychologist Craig Bord devoted a whole book to the

subject, subtitled The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution. A person suffering from technostress is described as

technostressed or even technostressed out; both terms can refer either to problems of adaptation, or simply to the special stresses of spending the day at a computer which might fail. In California, psychologists recommend electrobashing (literally taking one's frustrations out on a computer) to release these tensions.

An assortment of 'technostressed-out' humans delighted in hurling malfunctioning televisions, telephone answering machines...and video cameras off a balcony to oblivion.

The Times 18 May 1990, p. 1

Throughout modern society, humans are enslaved by the machines that seem to empower them. Symptoms include paranoia, fatigue, low self-esteem, flagging libido, anxiety, headaches, and over-stimulation. Collectively, they are 'technostress'.

The Australian 29 May 1990, p. 47

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (Lifestyle and Leisure) (Youth Culture) see Turtle

Teflon noun (Politics)

Used attributively of a politician or political administration, in Teflon politician, Teflon presidency, Teflon president, etc.:

able to shrug off scandal or misjudgement and deflect criticism on to others, so that nothing 'sticks'.

Etymology: A metaphorical use of the trade mark Teflon, a non-stick polymer coating used on saucepans and other cooking utensils.

History and Usage: This sense was invented by US Congresswoman Pat Schroeder in August 1983, when she said in Congress:

After carefully watching Ronald Reagan he is attempting a breakthrough in political technology--he has been perfecting the Teflon coated Presidency. He sees to it that nothing sticks to him.

The imagery proved very successful in political life, and was later applied to a number of other politicians--at local and

national level--who somehow managed to ensure that someone else was blamed for any scandals or misjudgements involving their administration.

The Mayor is celebrated for...distancing himself as far as possible from whatever may have gone wrong...The executive director of the largest local public-employees' union has called him 'the Teflon mayor'.

New Yorker 28 Jan. 1985, p. 74

Presidential assistant Richard Darman told me that the so-called Teflon phenomenon--the fact that blame never seemed to stick to President Reagan, even after such disasters as the Beirut suicide bombing...--was directly related to journalists' tendency to emphasize personality over substance.

Mark Hertsgaard On Bended Knee (1988), p. 67

telecombining form (Science and Technology)

Widely used as the first element of compounds relating to telecommunications, particularly in words for concepts which have been transformed by the use of telecommunications and information technology.

Etymology: Originally from Greek tele 'afar, far off': the first two syllables of telephone, television, etc.

History and Usage: Every innovation in telecommunications during the twentieth century seems to have set off its own explosion of words formed on tele-, which of course has a far longer history in the more general sense of 'at a distance'. It

is the continuous improvement in telematics, the long-distance transmission of computerized information, which lies behind many of the new telewords formed during the eighties. This proliferation began in the mid seventies, when such services as Ceefax and Oracle began to be referred to collectively as

teletext. The later extension of this idea to text transmission

via the telephone network, combined with a facility enabling the domestic user to transmit as well as receive text, created the conditions for a variety of services: teleordering (the

ordering of books direct from publishers by booksellers) was followed by teleshopping (shopping conducted from home using a computer and a telephone), telebanking, telebroking, and even

telebetting. The telecommunications revolution also had its effect on working practices: the teleconference (or telemeeting), an idea dating from the fifties, became more

practical, and some office workers began to telecommute, or work from home while communicating with the office and elsewhere via data links (a process also known as teleworking). From Scandinavia in the second half of the decade came the concept of the telecottage: a room in a rural area filled with equipment

for teleworking, available for shared use by local residents; working from one of these is known as telecottaging. Alongside all of this new technology, the old technologies continued to give rise to telecompounds: telemarketing, the marketing of goods or services through unsolicited telephone calls (carried out by telemarketers), became an established selling technique,

while television journalism produced many humorous nonce-words such as telepundit and fund-raising extravaganzas such as the Telethon (an old concept, but one which was given a new lease of life in the eighties).

France provided the impetus by seeing the smart card as

a way of modernising the country's telephone and banking systems with card-based payphones and telebanking and teleshopping facilities which rely on home computers connected to a telephone.

New Scientist 11 Feb. 1989, p. 64

The appeal of telecommuting lies in its ability to extend office functionality beyond the confines of the office.

UnixWorld Sept. 1989, p. 102

Nynex intends to make the country a high-tech show-place, with fiber-optics and other digital technologies, video teleconferencing and high-speed facsimile services.

New York Times 10 Dec. 1989, section 3, p. 9

In Scandinavia around 200 rural 'Telecottages' have been set up for business use in the last five years.

Daily Telegraph 11 Apr. 1990, p. 32

ITV Telethon '90:...A mass tap dance..., plus a celebrity tug o' war, ditto It's A Knockout, a giggle of comedians...and a flying visit from the RAF.

Guardian 28 May 1990, p. 30

Alan Denbigh, Acre's teleworking adviser, predicts that the telecottage movement will soon begin to grow fast.

Daily Telegraph 5 Jan. 1991, Weekend section, p. iii

telespud (Lifestyle and Leisure) (People and Society) see couch potato

televangelist

noun (Lifestyle and Leisure) (People and Society)

An evangelical preacher who uses television or other mass media to promote his or her doctrines.

Etymology: Formed by telescoping television and evangelist to make a blend. The unblended forms television evangelist and TV evangelist, and the compound tele-evangelist, also occur, but

are less common.

History and Usage: Television, especially on channels devoted to religious broadcasting, was first used by some evangelical Christian denominations as an effective means of preaching the Christian gospel as long ago as the fifties, when the first pray-TV channel was set up in the US. Evangelists with a gift for mass communication, such as Billy Graham, became

world-famous, but televangelism as such remained a predominantly American phenomenon for some years after the words televangelist and televangelism started to be used in the mid seventies. With

the renewed fashion for fundamentalist doctrine during the early eighties, however (see fundie), televangelists such as Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Oral Roberts (who even founded a university named after himself) achieved considerable fame and political influence. In the later

eighties, a succession of scandals involving the financial and sexual affairs of certain televangelists brought them into the news in a more negative way.