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The Oxford Dictionary of New Words

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Financial Times 19 Apr. 1990, section 1, p. 9

Yardie noun and adjective (Drugs) (People and Society)

In British slang:

noun: A member of any of a number of Jamaican or West Indian gangs (see posse) which engage in organized crime throughout the world, especially in connection with illicit drug-trafficking.

In the plural, Yardies: these gangs as a whole or the criminal subculture that they represent.

adjective: Of or belonging to the Yardies.

Etymology: The name is derived from the Jamaican English word yard (or yaad) which originally meant 'a house or home' and came to be used by Jamaicans living outside Jamaica for the home country. The suffix -ie is common in nicknames for people from a particular place: compare Aussie or Ozzie for an Australian.

History and Usage: Although probably active in the UK for some time, the Yardies only began to feature in the news towards the end of the eighties, when they were associated with the spread

of drug-related crime in the UK in much the same way as the drug posses were in the US.

The Yard was responding to claims that a Caribbean gang--ironically called The Yardies--has moved into London's Brixton area and is now setting up its own network of pushers to sell the so-called champagne-drug.

Today 9 July 1986, p. 9

The Yardies is a loose association of violent criminals, most of whom originated in Kingston, Jamaica and whose principal interest is the trafficking and sale of

cocaine. In Britain they are perceived as a new phenomenon. In America, however, their counterparts, the 'posses', are said to have been responsible for up to

800 drug-related murders since 1984.

Daily Telegraph 13 Oct. 1988, p. 13

Many of the Shower who escaped the raid have fled abroad, some of them perhaps heading for Britain to join their 'yardie' colleagues. But more young Jamaican recruits will soon leave the tranquillity of the

Caribbean for the mean streets of Washington DC.

Sunday Telegraph 27 Nov. 1988, p. 10

25.2 yo

yo

interjection (Youth Culture)

Among young people (especially in the US): an exclamation used in greeting or to express excitement etc., and associated particularly with rap and hip hop culture; hey!

Etymology: Yo has been used as an exclamation to attract attention (especially when warning of some danger) since the fifteenth century, and is familiar to many in the sailor's yo-ho-ho; the present use is a re-adoption of the old word in a new context by a limited group of people, who use it as a cult expression.

History and Usage: Yo started in Black street slang in the US, probably during the late seventies, and was popularized through the spread of rap and hip hop to White youth culture during the eighties. By the end of the eighties it had become a fashionable greeting among youngsters in the UK as well as the US; a fashion which was reinforced, perhaps, by its use in the popular television series The Simpsons and in a number of films featuring Sylvester Stallone.

During the holiday, wherever he roamed in his Watts neighborhood, congratulations rained down. 'Yo, Hagan! Nice job, man!'

Sports Illustrated 25 Dec. 1989, p. 45

Yo, man, quit lookin' at 'em! You got detec written all over you.

Village Voice (New York) 30 Jan. 1990, p. 35

The Guardian Angels...applauded him with a meaty sound. Great fists, many gloved, bashed into each other. 'Yo,' they shouted, rather than anything English.

Independent 16 May 1990, p. 6

25.3 yuppie...

yuppie noun and adjective Also written Yuppie or yuppy (People and Society)

noun: A young urban (or upwardly mobile) professional; a humorous name for a member of a socio-economic group made up of professional people working in cities.

adjective: Of or characteristic of a yuppie or yuppies in general; of a kind that would appeal to a yuppie.

Etymology: Formed from the initial letters of Young Urban Professional (or Young Upwardly mobile Professional) and the suffix -ie.

History and Usage: Yuppie was probably the most important buzzword of the mid eighties, an extraordinarily successful coinage which somehow succeeded in summing up a whole social group, its lifestyle and aspirations, in a single word. In an

article on the writer John Irving in 1982, the American critic Joseph Epstein described them as

People who are undecided about growing up: they are college-educated, getting on and even getting up in the world, but with a bit of the hippie-dippie counterculture clinging to them still--yuppies, they have been called, the YUP standing for young urban professionals.

At first (in 1982-4) yuppie competed with the form yumpie (which included the m of upwardly-mobile), but this form was perhaps too close to the verb yomp, with its military route-march associations, to succeed. A measure of the popularity of yuppie was the speed with which it generated derivatives: the nouns

yuppiedom, yuppieism, and yuppi(e)ness all appeared within two years of the coinage of yuppie, closely followed by the

adjective yuppyish. By the middle of the decade there was also an awareness of the way in which yuppie culture pervaded and changed its surroundings, a process known as yuppification (with an associated verb, yuppify, and adjective yuppified). Perhaps more telling even than the derivatives were all the variations

on the theme of yuppie that journalists turned out in the second half of the decade, including yuffie (young urban failure), yummie (young upwardly-mobile mommy), and those listed under buppie, guppie, woopie, and yappie. The second half of the eighties saw the rise in popularity of New Age culture and of a more environmentally aware lifestyle which made the yuppie approach seem already a little outdated, but it was by then so familiar that it could safely be abbreviated to yup without fear

of misunderstanding. Even the abbreviated form acquired derivatives: the language of yups was Yuppese or Yupspeak, a young female yup was a yuppette (compare hackette), their preferred type of car was a yupmobile, and so on.

Yuppies have come in for some revisionist thinking lately. The yup backlash is such that many people will no longer speak the 'Y word' and others are spurning pesto for pot pies.

Adweek 17 June 1985

Who are the yuppies? Gee acknowledges that young urban professionals 'who once thought nothing of jumping in

the old Bimmer [BMW] and heading down to the local gourmet grocer for some Brie' are keeping a lower profile, fearing they may be called 'too yup'.

Los Angeles Times 5 May 1986, section 4, p. 2

Their 'bashers' (shacks) will be forcibly removed by police to make way for developers who want to 'yuppify' the Charing Cross area.

Observer 16 Aug. 1987, p. 3

What Dickens is describing, I suddenly realised, is yuppification. The trendies were moving in.

Independent 17 Sept. 1987, p. 18

'The yupskies are coming!' said Mr Baker...in Leningrad yesterday after being impressed by the new breed of young upwardly-mobile Soviet entrepreneurs.

Daily Telegraph 8 Oct. 1988, p. 32

There is a risk of forced selling breaking out in the yuppier sections of London's housing market.

Arena Autumn/Winter 1988, p. 99

Married yuppette Kathy is knee deep into her affair with...Tom.

Independent 16 May 1989, p. 29

How will the eighties be labelled? The Yuppie decade? The Thatcher miracle/disaster? The years when pop and rock got a conscience? The dawning of the breakdown of communism?

Guardian 22 Nov. 1989, p. 43

You didn't think yuppies liked poetry. Don't be vulgar and simplistic, dear Val.

Antonia Byatt Possession (1990), p. 417

These sound like thoroughly well-organised chaps who would take to the executive life like yuppies to bottles of Perrier water.

Punch 20 Apr. 1990, p. 9

yuppie flu

noun (Health and Fitness)

A colloquial nickname for myalgic encephalomyelitis (see ME).

Etymology: So named because it attacks high achievers (yuppie

types), and mimics or follows an attack of flu.

History and Usage: A popular nickname which reflects the scepticism of doctors and public alike about this illness until quite recently: see the entry for ME.

Graham...told Mr Patrick Cuff, the coroner, that his mother had suffered for several years from ME--myalgic encephalomyelitis, known as Yuppie Flu.

Daily Telegraph 8 Feb. 1990, p. 3

For many years, it has been called 'yuppie flu', because most of the estimated 1 to 5 million who suffer from the disorder are affluent professional women from 25 to 45.

Chicago Tribune (North Sports Final edition) 19 Nov. 1990, p. 6

26.0Z

26.1zap

zap

intransitive or transitive verb (Lifestyle and Leisure)

In media slang, to move quickly through the commercial break on a recorded videotape, either by using the fast-forward facility

or by switching through live channels. Also, to avoid the commercials in live television by using the remote control device to switch through other channels until they are over.

Etymology: Zap began as an onomatopoeic word in comic strips for the sound of a ray gun, bullet, laser, etc.; as a verb it

has meant either 'to kill' or 'to move quickly and vigorously' since the sixties. The sense defined here is essentially a specialized application of the second of these two branches of meaning, but when applied to live television it is influenced by the first branch--the remote control device is used like a ray gun, and the effectiveness of the advertisements is destroyed if people zap through other channels while they are on.

History and Usage: This sense of zap arose in the mid eighties, when many television sets became available with remote control (in other words, they became zappable) and there were the first signs of a boom in domestic video. The action noun zapping arose at about the same time; at first, a zapper was a person who did this, but by the end of the decade it had also become a standard name for the remote control device itself.

For the ITV companies there is the additional problem of 'zapping' to contend with--the habitual use of the fast-forward button to bypass the commercial breaks in recorded material.

Listener 9 Feb. 1984, p. 14

The television remote controller or 'thingy' which Christopher Croft (letter, 18 January) is at a loss to name, is the enabling device for the practice of 'zapping', whereby Channel 4 News and Wogan can be viewed simultaneously. In our household the thingy is called 'Frank', after the eponymous rock star, Frank Zappa.

Independent 19 Jan. 1989, p. 27

The decade was also marked by gizmos that accelerated our daily lives: food was nukable; TVs, zappable; mail, faxable.

Life Fall 1989, p. 13

The remote control is small and handy...It's almost identical to Tatung's Astra-box zapper.

What Satellite July 1990, p. 120

26.2 zero

zero

adjective (Politics)

In the names of disarmament proposals:

zero option, a proposal made in the early eighties for the US to cancel plans to deploy longer-range theatre nuclear weapons in Europe if Soviet longer-range weapons were also withdrawn;

zero zero option (or double zero option or simply double zero), a proposal made by the Soviet Union for the withdrawal from

Europe of all NATO and Soviet shorterand longer-range nuclear weapons (made a reality in 1987 under the terms of the INF treaty);

triple zero option (or simply triple zero), a proposal to include short-range tactical weapons as well.

Etymology: All based on the idea of zero as representing 'nothing', although, strictly speaking, none of the proposals would do away with all weapons.

History and Usage: The original zero option dates from the beginning of the eighties, when some European countries felt very uneasy about the build-up of theatre nuclear weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain; the term was revived in relation to the control of these longer-range INF weapons in the mid eighties. Double zero was a Soviet proposal of 1986-7, made at a time when the cold war was visibly thawing under Mr Gorbachev's administration in the Soviet Union; it was essentially put into practice (for Europe at least) by the INF treaty. There remains some pressure to move on to the global double zero, which would extend the provisions to weapons held outside Europe. Triple zero involves even shorter-range weapons, which some European countries still see as a worrying threat.

If Pershing II and Cruise are...to be negotiated away under the zero-zero option, and if Polaris is truly obsolescent...then the Labour Party 'unilateral' policy seems to differ very little in substance from that of the Alliance.

New Scientist 16 Apr. 1987, p. 49

If we said yes to zero option, we said yes, yes to

double zero option, and who knows, there may be a triple

zero option involved in tactical neutral weapons.

MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour 22 Apr. 1987

The further offer was formalised in Moscow last March, when Mr Gorbachev proposed to Mr George Schultz that all SRINF category weapons be removed from Europe. Because the LRINF proposal had been called the 'zero option',

the joint scheme has come to be called the 'double zero'. 'Double zero' is, nonetheless, an inexact term, because 'single zero' would leave the superpowers with 100 missiles each, as long as they were held in Asiatic Russia and the continental United States respectively.

Daily Telegraph 21 May 1987, p. 16

Eduard Shevardnadze emphasised that in the Soviet Union the fact is appreciated that Spain was among the first West European States which supported the double zero for Europe and then also the global double zero.

BBC Summary of World Broadcasts 22 Jan. 1988, p. SU/A7

26.3 Zidovudine...

Zidovudine

noun Also written zidovudine (Health and Fitness)

The approved name of the anti-viral drug AZT, used in the management of Aids.

Etymology: The first part, zido-, and the ending, -dine, are taken from the chemical name azidodeoxythymidine, but it is not clear why the syllable -vu- was added.

History and Usage: The name Zidovudine has been in use since 1987, but the drug remains popularly known as AZT (see the comments at AZT). Zidovudine itself is sometimes abbreviated to ZDV.

Acyclovir is already in use, in combination with

Zidovudine (formerly AZT), for Aids patients.

 

Guardian 7 July 1989, p. 3

 

Every week I watch AIDS patients deteriorate and waste

 

away despite Zidovudine (ZDV) therapy.

 

Nature 14 June 1990, p. 574

ZIFT

acronym Also written Zift (Health and Fitness) (Science and

 

Technology)

 

Short for zygote intra-fallopian transfer, a technique for

 

helping infertile couples to conceive, in which a zygote (a

 

fertilized egg which has been allowed to begin developing into

 

an embryo) is re-implanted into one of the woman's Fallopian

 

tubes after fertilization with her partner's sperm outside the

 

body.

 

Etymology: The initial letters of Zygote Intra-Fallopian

 

Transfer. In scientific terms, a zygote is a cell formed by the

 

union of two gametes (see GIFT).

 

History and Usage: The technique was developed during the

 

second half of the eighties as a further refinement of GIFT,

 

offering greater certainty of establishing a pregnancy. However,

 

unlike GIFT, it takes fertilization outside the body once again,

 

and is therefore open to the same ethical or religious

 

objections as IVF.

 

A new variation, zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT),

 

may further improve GIFT's odds. The egg is fertilized

 

in a petri dish, and the embryo is placed in the

 

fallopian tube about 18 hours later. ZIFT has been tried

 

on fewer than 50 couples, so it is too soon to measure

 

its success.

 

US News & World Report 3 Apr. 1989, p. 75

 

On this occasion, I was being treated with a variation

 

of Gift, called Zift (Zygote intrafallopian transfer),

 

in which the eggs and sperm are mixed outside the body

 

and then replaced in the tube.

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