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In 2014, the US marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the basis for the Johnson administration’s escalation of American military involvement in Southeast Asia and war against North Vietnam. Vietnam War Slang outlines the context behind the slang used by members of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. Troops facing and inflicting death display a high degree of linguistic creativity. Vietnam was the last American war fought by an army with conscripts, and their involuntary participation in the war added a dimension to the language.　 War has always been an incubator for slang; it is brutal, and brutality demands a vocabulary to describe what we don’t encounter in peacetime civilian life.　 Furthermore, such language serves to create an intense bond between comrades in the armed forces, helping them to support the heavy burdens of war.　 The troops in Vietnam faced the usual demands of war, as well as several that were unique to Vietnam – a murky political basis for the war, widespread corruption in the ruling government, untraditional guerilla warfare, an unpredictable civilian population in Vietnam, and a growing lack of popular support for the war back in the US.　 For all these reasons, the language of those who fought in Vietnam was a vivid reflection of life in wartime. Vietnam War Slang lays out the definitive record of the lexicon of Americans who fought in the Vietnam War.　 Assuming no prior knowledge, it presents around 2000 headwords, with each entry divided into sections giving parts of speech, definitions, glosses, the countries of origin, dates of earliest known citations, and citations. It will be an essential resource for Vietnam veterans and their families, students and readers of history, and anyone interested in the principles underpinning the development of slang. Preface. Entries A-Z. Bibliography. \"War breeds slang: and the longer that war the better. Other than World War I Vietnam was perhaps combat's greatest creator of new language. In his wide-ranging, authoritative dictionary, Tom Dalzell, one of America's leading lexicographers of slang, has brought it all together: from mummy sacks to the long long duck's back and the remfs to the Arvins. This a unique, unrivalled take on a war that remains a key moment in modern history. Tim O’Brien has written about ‘The Things They Carried’; now Tom Dalzell brings us ‘The Words They Used’\" Jonathon Green, author of Green's Dictionary of Slang \"A very valuable collection of Vietnam War slang.\"- Gerald Cohen, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA \"Tom Dalzell’s extraordinary Vietnam War Slang invites us to look back through the words and meanings of the Vietnam era — fascinating in themselves — into the culture they signify. Each entry includes a contemporary quotation or two, illustrating use of the word in question, and thus the dictionary is an anthology of fading voices from distant decades amplified into the twenty-first century, voices we need to hear. It should be in every American library, on every word-lover’s bookshelf, and assigned in every university course about the period or the phenomenon of the Vietnam War.\" Michael Paul Adams, Indiana University, USA

Over 6000 entries With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage reflects usage lexicography at its finest. It delights while providing instruction on skillful, persuasive, and vivid writing. Garner liberates English from two extremes: both from the hidebound “purists” who mistakenly believe that split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions are malfeasances and from the linguistic relativists who believe that whatever people say or write must necessarily be accepted. The judgments here are backed up not just by a lifetime of study but also by an empirical grounding in the largest linguistic corpus ever available. In this fourth edition, Garner has made extensive use of corpus linguistics to include ratios of standard terms as compared against variants in modern print sources. No other resource provides as comprehensive, reliable, and empirical a guide to current English usage. For all concerned with writing and editing, Garner’s Modern English Usage will prove invaluable as a desk reference. Garner illustrates with actual examples, cited with chapter and verse, all the linguistic blunders that modern writers and speakers are prone to, whether in word choice, syntax, phrasing, punctuation, or pronunciation. This is the liveliest and most compulsively readable reference work for writers of our time.

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is an A-Z reference book, giving an up-to-date account of the debatable issues of English usage and written style. Its advice draws on a wealth of recent research and data from very large corpora of American and British English - illuminating their many divergences and also points of convergence on which international English can be based. The book comprises more than 4000 points of word meaning, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and larger issues of inclusive language, and effective writing and argument. It also provides guidance on grammatical terminology, and covers topics in electronic communication and the internet. The discussion notes the major dictionaries, grammars and usage books in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia, allowing readers to calibrate their own practices as required. CGEU is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but offers a principled basis for implementing progressive or more conservative decisions on usage.

In the most reliable and readable guide to effective writing for the Americans of today, Wilson answers questions of meaning, grammar, pronunciation, punctuation, and spelling in thousands of clear, concise entries. His guide is unique in presenting a systematic, comprehensive view of language as determined by context. Wilson provides a simple chart of contexts—from oratorical speech to intimate, from formal writing to informal—and explains in which contexts a particular usage is appropriate, and in which it is not.

Here is a wonderful Baedeker to down-and-dirty politics--more than six hundred slang terms straight from the smoke-filled rooms of American political speech.Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang illuminates a rich and colorful segment of our language.

To the amusement of the pundits and the regret of the electorate, our modern political jargon has become even more brazenly two-faced and obfuscatory than ever. Where once we had Muckrakers, now we have Bed-Wetters. Where Blue Dogs once slept peaceably in the sun, Attack Dogs now roam the land. During election season-a near constant these days-the coded rhetoric of candidates and their spin doctors, and the deliberately meaningless but toxic semiotics of the wing nuts and backbenchers, reach near-Orwellian levels of self-satisfaction, vitriol, and deceit. The average NPR or talk radio listener, MSNBC or Fox News viewer, or blameless New York Times or Wall Street Journal reader is likely to be perplexed, nonplussed, and lulled into a state of apathetic resignation and civic somnolence by the rapid-fire incomprehensibility of political pronouncement and commentary-which is, frankly, putting us exactly where the pundits want us. Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs, and Washington Handshakes is a tonic and a corrective. It is a reference and field guide to the language of politics by two veteran observers that not only defines terms and phrases but also explains their history and etymology, describes who uses them against whom, and why, and reveals the most telling, infamous, amusing, and shocking examples of their recent use. It is a handbook of lexicography for the Wonkette and This Town generation, a sleeker, more modern Safire's Political Dictionary, and a concise, pointed, bipartisan guide to the lies, obfuscations, and helical constructions of modern American political language, as practiced by real-life versions of the characters on House of Cards.

Introduction The rapid expansion of the Internet and computing power in recent years has opened up the possibility of using social media for pharmacovigilance. While this general concept has been proposed by many, central questions remain as to whether social media can provide earlier warnings for rare and serious events than traditional signal detection from spontaneous report data. Objective Our objective was to examine whether specific product–adverse event pairs were reported via social media before being reported to the US FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). Methods A retrospective analysis of public Facebook and Twitter data was conducted for 10 recent FDA postmarketing safety signals at the drug–event pair level with six negative controls. Social media data corresponding to two years prior to signal detection of each product–event pair were compiled. Automated classifiers were used to identify each ‘post with resemblance to an adverse event’ (Proto-AE), among English language posts. A custom dictionary was used to translate Internet vernacular into Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA ® ) Preferred Terms. Drug safety physicians conducted a manual review to determine causality using World Health Organization-Uppsala Monitoring Centre (WHO-UMC) assessment criteria. Cases were also compared with those reported in FAERS. Findings A total of 935,246 posts were harvested from Facebook and Twitter, from March 2009 through October 2014. The automated classifier identified 98,252 Proto-AEs. Of these, 13 posts were selected for causality assessment of product–event pairs. Clinical assessment revealed that posts had sufficient information to warrant further investigation for two possible product–event associations: dronedarone–vasculitis and Banana Boat Sunscreen--skin burns. No product–event associations were found among the negative controls. In one of the positive cases, the first report occurred in social media prior to signal detection from FAERS, whereas the other case occurred first in FAERS. Conclusions An efficient semi-automated approach to social media monitoring may provide earlier insights into certain adverse events. More work is needed to elaborate additional uses for social media data in pharmacovigilance and to determine how they can be applied by regulatory agencies.

This essay examines the lived literacy experiences of six multilingual immigrant writers, arguing that their everyday multilingual practices foster a distinct rhetorical sensibility: rhetorical attunement—an ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity. Rhetorical attunement is a way of acting in the world as a multilingual writer that assumes linguistic multiplicity and invites the negotiation of meaning across linguistic differences. The essay shows that multilingual writers aren’t aware of this quality of language a priori, but come to know—become rhetorically attuned—across a lifetime of communicating across difference.

Every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, has released a list of banished words—terms in the English language that deserve never to be spoken again. The university’s 2016 list includes “stakeholder.\" The term “stakeholder” should be relegated to the same linguistic storage facility as “trepanation” and “orgone generator.” To start, “stakeholder” has a mercenary connotation. The original meaning of the term is a person who literally held the money of bettors while the game was on. This meaning evolved into a second definition: “a person, company, etc., with a concern or (esp. financial) interest in ensuring the success of an organization, business, system, etc.”Such a word origin is especially curious when it comes to health policy because stakeholders, in fact, frequently do have financial interests in the issue at hand. Depending on the matter, “key stakeholders” may include hospitals, physician practices, pharmaceutical companies, long-term care facilities, managed care organizations, insurers, and health IT companies.It is, of course, essential to listen to the perspectives of those whose bottom line is affected by regulation and policy, but a catchall phrase like “stakeholder” obscures the landscape in question, much like a dense fog.