The ‘80s Come to Terms - More Ugliness Than Beauty Was Added to the Language During the Past Decade

IN A HANDOUT reviewing ‘the language of the ‘80s,” Webster’s New World Dictionary calls that period “a Golden Age of Technology” and notes that such terms as teleconference , satellite TV , home video and VCR came into the language.

But every step forward produces its parasites. The golden age of technology also brought us hackers and gave the word virus a new and metaphorical meaning.

Looking over the newcomers listed by Dr. Victoria Neufeldt, editor-in-chief of the dictionary, it seems to me that more ugliness than beauty was added to the language in those 10 years.

New words in the world of business seemed to reflect the decade’s greed and moral laxity. Terms that emerged from the financial heights and pits included leveraged buyouts , risk arbitrage , junk bonds and double breasting --operating two companies, one union and one non-union.

Our genius for creating acronyms produced NIMBY (not in my back yard) and MEGO (my eyes glazed over). I’m familiar with the warning “not in my back yard,” said, for example, of malathion spraying or a proposed prison location. Also, my eyes have sometimes glazed over. But I hadn’t heard the acronyms for either.

Terms for new family relationships also entered the language: One was DINK , (double income, no kids); another was DINKY (double income, no kids yet). I believe it was the 1980 census that introduced POSSLQ (persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters).

Dr. Neufeldt says that the drug-oriented word crack entered the language in the ‘80s but makes no note of ice , the newest consumer item on the drug front. Meanwhile, she says, Rambo became a new symbol of national supremacy.

I am surprised to find that Dr. Neufeldt and her lexicographers are just catching on to chiles rellenos , Mexican mole and varietal wines, all of which have been around for decades. Chiles rellenos has been a staple of Mexican-American menus since at least the 1930s.

Arenas that produced numerous new words or phrases in the ‘70s were not as prolific in the ‘80s. Fewer words came, for example, from space technology, the women’s movement and politics.

It was the decade of the yuppies, and the consumer society that they seemed to inhabit. At their hand they found cellular telephones, camcorders, personal computers (PCs) and compact discs, and at their service were such computer phenomena as bio chips, firmware, spreadsheets, and menus and mouses--old words with new meanings. Dr. Neufeldt doesn’t say whether the plural of mouse in that sense is mouses or mice . I have seen them advertised as mice .

Dr. Neufeldt tells us that the disco craze faded early in the decade, to be followed by break dancing and later by dirty dancing. I’ve always thought that what finished off break dancing was the closing extravagance of the 1984 Olympics, when hundreds of youths went through the contortions of that fad on a huge set at the center of the Coliseum. As Herb Caen commented in the San Francisco Chronicle, the producers of that show didn’t seem to realize that break dancing was “already over.”

The popularity of body building in the decade popularized such terms as pecs , delts , lats and steroids , though I’ve never used any of them but steroids, and I’m not sure I’ve used them .

Shorthand terms for political positions are commonplace in our language. In the ‘80s, pro-life and pro-choice took on meanings that seemed to divide the nation philosophically.

Politics gave us Contra-gate , an uninspired derivative of Watergate; Irangate , another example of the same insipid device, and Teflon man , a term that describes an ex-President’s uncanny resistance to political injury.

Near the end of the decade, the word fax fell into common usage and presaged yet a new household tool of communication.

I would have thought that both words were in use before the ‘80s, but Dr. Neufeldt lists televangelists and gridlock as being of that decade and notes wryly that some televangelists did not survive it.

I do know that I was caught in gridlock before 1980, and I feel sure that I used that word to describe the phenomenon. In any case, it isn’t going to go away.

“We also played VCRs or listened to music on our ‘Walkmans,’ ” Dr. Neufeldt concludes, “and read that in the near future ‘superconductors’ might take us coast-to-coast on magnetic air, and we could enjoy a ‘total home environment’ when electronics would pipe everything into and out of our homes.”

It was also a decade in which “the Evil Empire” fell into history and the Russian words glasnost and perestroika entered our language, symbolizing a rollback of communist totalitarianism and a thawing of the Cold War. Near its end, the words Tian An Men similarly crossed the seas and became symbolic in our language of bloody political repression.