take out
1: a social date; I'm taking him out this weekend.
2: to bring humor to somebody;
That girl takes me out with that wild hairdo.
3: to kill; Take him out, and make it look like an accident.
tango & cash
heroin with a purity approaching 90% [AP story]
tango uniform
[mil] Tits Up,
sometimes politely rendered Toes Up:
broken
TARFU
1: Things Are Really
Fucked Up;
see SNAFU
teabag
fellatio,
performed so that the woman takes a man's penis and testicles
into her mouth; She's got a mouth so big she can teabag me.
text swell
A phenomenon known in the tranlsation world as text swell. Anytime
you translate, the resulting text, in whatever new language, will take
about 20% more space. It always takes more words in another language to
get the same meaning than in the language the text was originally
written in. [Chris Malcolm, alt.english.usage, Aug 96]
Translators do sometimes resort to "amplification" in order to
properly convey meaning that is implicit in the original but that must
be made explicit in the translation. This does not necessarily mean that
the translation will be longer than the original. The English
translation of a French text, without amplification, will always be
shorter than the French original, because of the inherent structural
differences between the two languages. In English, I can say "John's
book" (two words); in French, I must say le livre de Jean (four
words). The opposite would be true if the source language had been, for
example, Arabic, which is usually more "compact" than English. In
English, "I am a translator" (four words) is longer than the Arabic
original anaa mutarjim (two words). The "text swell" that results from
supplying the verb "to be" and the indefinite article "a" is required
for structural reasons, not as a necessity to convey meaning that would
otherwise be lost. The grammatically incorrect "me translator" would be
perfectly understandable.
[K.-Benoit Evans, alt.english.usage, Aug 96]
they
"They," by the way, grates a little on my nerves when its antecedent
is "everyone" (as in "everyone is entitled to their own opinion").
However, look at it this way: "whatever" pronoun you use in this
situation is bound to create misgivings. There's an irresolvable tension
between two English rules: (1) A pronoun must agree with its antecedent
in gender. (2) A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in number. Take
your pick: "he" or "she" volunteers gender where the antecedent doesn't
really specify any; "they" volunteers number where the antecedent has
plural implications, though it's singular in form.
That's exactly why the speech of the people, long before the rise of
organized pronoun envy, commonly employed "they" as a pronoun for
"everyone". It was so common that English teachers laid great stress on
"correcting" it (according to the standards of the time).
Switching to the other horn of an unavoidable dilemma shouldn't be
that hard. Look at it this way: our language already did this once, when
it substituted "you" for "thou", although addressing only one person.
(Conjectural history: kings were addressed as "you" because, supposedly,
they represented the entire country. One didn't normally address a king
in his capacity as a mere person. Later, "you" took on more and more of
the traffic because of status inflation.) [Dick H. Fredrickson, FIDO
Words conference, Nov 95]
tits on a keyboard
the bumps on key caps to help
touch-typists keep their fingers on the home keys
[1995, Ken Ellis, FIDO Funny echo]
tits on a bull, ~ nun
useless
tits up
broken
torque
to make angry; He really torques me,;
also torque off, torquing my ass; torqued off
tourists
those who take training classes just to take a vacation
from their jobs; We had three serious students in
the class; the rest were tourists; from e-mail, Aug 97
treeware
manuals and documentation; July 97, from an e-mail
trip
1: -n- humerous, outrageous, wild; That girl has a funny
hairdo; what a trip.
2: -n- intoxication, usually on hallucinogens; trippin' on a dot
trivia is the plural of trivium
The lower division of the seven liberal arts in medieval schools,
consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. [Medieval Latin, from Latin,
crossroads : tri-, tri- + via, road.] I suspect that it takes at least
three roads intersecting to force you into making a choice. (Two roads
intersecting would just be ONE long road!) Why the lower grades were
called the "crossroad" is anyone's guess, but I can see where the
subject matter could be considered "trivial" in the modern sense.
1) The classic quadrivium was "what was taught at the crossroads."
It consisted of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy.
2) These were 4
of the seven "Liberal Arts" with Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric.
3) The 4
=(quad) in "quadrivium" got confused with the 4 subjects. The other
three were then called the trivium.
4) As they were considered easier
and preliminary, the adjective "trivial" came to carry that idea.
5) Hence trivia, that which is trivial.
[this must have come from the FIDO
Words conference, but I don't know the author]
TUIFI
The Ultimate In
Foul-Ups;
see SNAFU
Turkey
[mil]
Grumman F-14 Tomcat
tweaker
an addict to crystal methadone; Kevin Simpson, The Denver Post, 23 May
1996
two-flusher
referring to feces
so large that the toilet must be flushed twice to
eliminate it from the bowl