United States Slang, Jargon, and New Words from Double-Tongued Dictionary

Associated with or special to the United States or American people, places, or things. You can also see entries assigned to this category.

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yuca n. The list has become La Cosa Nostra’s own brand of made-in-Miami lingo: Breasts becametetraciclina, buttsfambecos, the vaginamamey, and the penisyuca orflauta. Having sex isquimbar or jamar. [Spanish United States Florida] [full cite] (Oct. 17, 2004)

zón n. Zón is nuyorican spanglish for zona in spanish and zone in english. [Spanglish Spanish United States] [full cite] (Jun. 28, 2004)

zeese n. The “Boontling” Knox refers to is a sort of argot or private language valley locals developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries using the syntax of English but substituting parts for wholes or referring to things by their uses or their most famous users. For example, a pay telephone rendered in Boontling is a “bucky walter” because a man named Walter Levi owned the first telephone in Anderson Valley and a call on early pay phones cost a nickel, which in those days was the buffalo nickel, nicknamed a “bucky.” Phone booths on the streets of Boont (Boonville) still bear signs identifying each of them as a bucky walter, such as the one outside the Horn of Zeese Cafe (the name is Boontling for cup of coffee), where a bright- lighter (city slicker) can score some bahl gorms (good food) unless he/she wants to drive the extra six miles to Poleeko (Philo). [English United States California] [full cite] (Jul. 8, 2004)

zeitgeber n. All companies exist in a cacophony of competing time rhythms, relentlessly drummed out by, among others, suppliers, clients, and competitors…These “external pacers” are known among academics as zeitgebers—German for “time givers”and they exert tremendous influence on your company. Zeitgebers can include anything from the fiscal year to the production schedule of a supplier to the school calendar in your community, and every company possesses a unique set of them. The more activities in your organization are synchronized with a particular zeitgeber, the more you’re “entrained” to it. [German Germany United States Business] [full cite] (Jun. 4, 2004)

zeitgeber n. Light and temperature are the only periodic or quasi-periodic environmental variables to which endogenous oscillation can be coupled: in nature they entrain the endogenous oscillation, thereby controlling period and establishing appropriate phase. They are, to use Aschoff’s phrase, the principal Zeitgeber. [German United States Science Jargon] [full cite] (Jun. 5, 2004)

zonker n. I have often wondered why a deep-dish fruit pie is called a cobbler. My online etymological dictionary suggests it is related to a 14th-century word for wooden bowl, cobeler. What is apparently the same dish is called zonker (or sonker) in Surry County. This local use is even more a mystery. [English United States North Carolina Food & Drink] [full cite] (May. 30, 2004)

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