LEND ME YOUR EAR: SURVIVAL TACTICS IN USE OF LANGUAGE

This article comes from our electronic archive and has not been reviewed. It may contain glitches.
Wednesday, February 17, 1993

Dictionaries and books on language have always topped my list of druthers. But my desire to own another stops short of the third edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. According to reviews, it contains 16,000 new entries, some of which this columnist would never whisper, much less write. Among the printable listed by critics are slang expressions such as "aggro", short for aggravation; "igg", short for ignore; "blivit" for annoying, and "dweeb" for flunky. I don't get "blivit", and "dweeb" defeats me. Is is slang, or baby-talk?

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