WASHINGTON, Reuter: A Third World diplomat with perfect textbook English is posted to Washington, attends his first cocktail party and encounters a baffling obstacle the American language.
He might hear people uttering such phrases as:
Reagan’ll strike out unless he goes on the stump and mounts areal blitz, He need a grass roots groundswell
Reagans got to twist some arms and kick some ass on the hill to rake in those fence -sill tiers, guys moths and boll weevils.
Those White House loose. Cannons are a pain, but Reagan will pull it off-he’s still Mr. Teflon. Strike out? Grass roots? Teflon? Boll weevils? a foreign visitor in such an all too common Washington situation might as well go slack jawed with bewilderment.
These strange terms were not taught in his English course as standard pocket dictionary is no help.
But there is a solution: A new Smithsonian Institution Survival Course, American English i Washington, D.C., aimed at traducing foreigners to the confusing idiom, metaphor, and jargon of homegrown Yank Lingo.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 22, 1986
