Quote:
Originally Posted by zikzak
What's that 3 letter slang word they use in the UK for cigarettes?
'Cig'. And the one you're thinking of doesn't have anything to do with American hostility to gay people. Whereas the American use of 'spaz' to indicate clumsiness or stupidity has everything to do with hostility to people with CP. (Who, of course, in American terms, are 'losers' and therefore worthy of contempt because they won't earn bundles and live in the right neighbourhoods.)
Even back in the Eighties, Billy Joel's 'Goodnight Saigon' was pretty startling to British ears, because of the lines, 'We came in spastic / Like tameless horses / We left in plastic / As numbered corpses.' The song is in the voice of a US Marine grunt from Vietnam, but those lines are not meant to be rough talk. Self-admiring US 'liberals' really do think such terms are acceptable. In Britain, since the 1970s, that kind of thing is mostly confined to school playground insults. In many lines of work it would be career-destroying.
The last person I ever heard using the term 'spaz' (or sometimes 'spasmoid') was the late Tory politician Alan Clark, and he was doing it to be obnoxious on purpose because he had this 'enfant terrible' reputation to live up to. And that was over 20 years ago, and Clark's long dead now, and I've literally never heard anyone talk like that from that day to this.
Last edited by 57 On Red; 12-10-2017 at 03:08 PM.