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Dave Eggers' The Wild Things is available for preorder, in regular hardcover and
limited-edition fur-covered.
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Still More Entries From The Future Dictionary of America.- - - - The Future Dictionary of America is a guide to the American language sometime in the future, when all or most of our country's problems are solved and the present administration is a distant memory. For more information about the book, click here. To order the book, click here. - - - - bellbottom [bel'-bah-tum] 1. n. the precise moment when a person, place, or thing demonstrates negative utility. Named for the bellbottom uniform trousers worn by sailors, which from 1871 onward were responsible for thousands of injuries until they were officially banned by the Filipino Navy in 2009 and replaced by the pinstriped poly-denim stirrup britches favored today. (SEE yankee pants). 2. v. to make obsolete or outlive one's usefulness. President Clinton bellbottomed when she appeared on Saturday Night Live with Senator Seacrest. 3. adj. describing a style of trousers with outsized cuffs popularized by urban Italian- and African-Americans in the late 1970s, Peruvian knife fighters in the early 2010s, and the North Jersey Disco Terrorists for a few weeks after the death of the Wizard Travolta on April 22, 2022. hush club [hush klub] n. SILENCE PARLOR; broadly, any soundproofed commercial establishment in which all forms of electronically amplified sound are banned. Hush clubs first appeared in London and New York in 2015, roughly 20 years after mainstream adoption of cellular technology and digital music playback; by 2018, hush clubs could be found in every major American city, with more than 300 in New York alone. Though silence parlors remain the most popular form of hush club, the term encompasses hush food co-ops, hush bookstores, hush sex outlets, hush churches, and hush pool halls—any private establishment that requires customers to waive their rights under the Cellular Freedom Act of 2008 and any applicable local right-to-amplify ordinances. New York's first hush club, the Clear Head Zone, was cofounded by Courtney Alcorn of the Screwed Youth Movement. The explosive national growth of hush clubs in the years 2015-2019 paralleled this movement's growing political influence; in its first national platform, written at the Cincinnati Conference in 2015, its founders explicitly called for a Politics of Sounds: "It has not escaped the attention of the screwed youth of America that the social, military, economic, and environmental policies that have combined to screw us were formulated and adopted in the Deaf Years, during which, as even a cursory examination of the televisual records will reveal, young so-called citizens had their heads blocked with amplified music and cell-phone chatter every waking minute of their lives. The screwed youth of America are collectively appalled and embarrassed and outraged by what the previous generation let happen to us while they were listening to something amplified, and we call upon all Americans under the age of 25 to volunteer in silence parlors and to patronize hush clubs, and to establish these parlors and clubs in whatever communities they may still be lacking." Today an estimated 4 to 5 percent of the U.S. population "frequently" or "sometimes" patronizes hush clubs. Icelandic system [iys-lan'-dik sis'- tum] n. (also teen circulation plan) a practice, supposedly based on child-rearing methods in medieval Iceland, of sending teenagers to live with other families, in order to learn adult skills and behavior from grownups they have not yet learned to manipulate and despise. A version of the Icelandic system, the foreign-student exchange, had long been employed by frustrated parents, but the practice went native and exploded in popularity with the publication, in 2023, of Britney-Penelope Leach's bestselling advice manual, A Fresh Start: Why Other Parents Can Raise Your Impossible Teen—and Why You Should Let Them. Leach noted that, away from their parents, adolescents were typically friendly, polite, curious, and altruistic; it was only at home that they became resentful and histrionic "typical teenagers." She proposed placing teens with new families to give them a less-cathected but still affectionate and protective adult-child relationship focused on the gradual assumption of adulthood. The federally funded Domestic Youth Exchange now enrolls approximately 50 percent of high-school juniors and seniors and is credited with significantly lowering juvenile crime, drug use, pregnancy, depression, rudeness, and TV-watching. pasta with grilled vegetables [pah'- stuh with grild vedj'-tuh-buls] n. [archaic] vegetarian entrée struck down by the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Mercer v. Bennigan's (2019). In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that pasta with grilled vegetables is an unconstitutional dinner offering and that chain restaurants in the Midwest must, "with all deliberate speed and all fresh ingredients," add another vegetarian selection. The Court stopped short of mandating a specific menu, but it did make a few nice suggestions involving tempeh and tofu. Chief Justice Nickerson wrote the majority opinion: "The court finds untenable the notion that flaccid, tasteless disks of yellow squash languishing atop rubbery spaghetti constitutes a lawful American dinner or freedom of choice," Nickerson wrote, "to say nothing of the cruel and unusual heat lamp." In 2035, the Court upheld Mercer v. Bennigan's by ruling 8-1, in Nash v. Applebee's, that three vegetarian appetizers do not equal an entrée. - - - - OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES: - - - - Still More Entries From The Future Dictionary of AmericaAre You Another Vietnam? By Don Steinberg How to Know Whether the Voice Around You, Promising Unspeakable Pain, Is Reciting 50 Cent Lyrics or Waging Real Threats to Your Life By Tony Antoniadis Tuesday List Terrificness: War on Terror Edition The Exploding Boy By Nick Parker |
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