tured in 1980’s ad campaigns, most notably in the
slogans “Made the American way” (Miller High Life)
and “Pump your money back into Canada” (Petro
Canada). The most famous slogan of the advertising
world was “Where’s the beef?,” croaked by diminu-
tive character actor Clara Peller in a fast-food com-
mercial.
A new word was coined to name a new type of
television commercial in the 1980’s, by combining
two other words. Marketers began to package hour-
length promotional films for television as if they
were talk shows or news programs, often with a celeb-
rity host. Programmers blended the first two sylla-
bles of the word “information” with the last two
of “commercial” to yield the format’s new name:
infomercial.
Politics and Science Such blending of words was
also common in political usage in the 1980’s. When
people with ties to the Reagan administration were
found to be trading arms to Iran and funneling the
profits to the Nicaraguan Contras, the last syllable
of “Watergate,” premiere political scandal of the
1970’s, was blended with the name of the rebel cadre
and the Middle Eastern country to provide names
for the new scandal: “Irangate” and “Contragate.” A
blend of Reagan’s name with the last two syllables of
“economics” provided the press with a convenient
word for the president’s financial theories: “Reagan-
omics.”
“Just Say No,” the slogan of an anti-drug cam-
paign spearheaded by First Lady Nancy Reagan, was
controversial, as it seemed to exemplify the vastly dif-
ferent approaches to social problems embraced by
conservatives and liberals. The former applauded
the slogan for its suggestion that the answer to Amer-
ica’s drug problem was straightforward and involved
individuals taking personal responsibility for their
actions. The latter derided it as an evasion of the
complexity of the drug issue and a refusal to see
broad social inequities as contributing to young peo-
ple’s drug use.
One new term that was often used in a jocular way
stemmed from a criminal trend of the decade: frus-
trated postal workers shooting colleagues in a string
of highly publicized incidents. Research indicated
that stress and resentment lay behind the workers’
rampages, so, for most of the 1980’s, many Ameri-
cans used the term “to go postal” to mean “to become
violently angry.” By the beginning of the following
decade, new policies at post offices had lessened ten-
sions, and the term faded somewhat from the na-
tional lexicon. An increase in the number of women
in the American workplace in the 1980’s resulted in
new terms for issues confronting many female work-
ers, such as “glass ceiling” (the invisible boundary
that frustrated women’s attempts to rise to positions
of corporate authority), “mommy track” (work op-
tions for women who chose to combine career with
motherhood), and “biological clock” (a woman’s
recognition of the limited time frame within which
she could bear children). Both women and men of a
certain class and lifestyle were often labeled “yup-
pies,” a term derived from the first letters of either
“young urban professional” or “young upwardly mo-
bile professional,” combined with the last syllable of
“hippie.” Many of these terms related to one of the
major coinages of the 1980’s: “political correctness,”
an expression originally employed by progressives to
poke fun at some of their own orthodoxies. The
term was soon appropriated by opponents on the
right, who removed the humor from the term while
preserving the accusation.
Science and technology contributed numerous
neologisms during the 1980’s. Undeniably the grim-
mest was the acronym AIDS, for acquired immuno-
deficiency syndrome, the medical scare and scourge
of the latter two decades of the twentieth century. To
name a popular invention of the era, blending pro-
vided “camcorder,” a combination of camera and re-
corder. Conventional derivation (joining existing
roots and stems) using the prefix “tele-” yielded
“telecommuting” (working from home via telephone
and computer), “teleconference” (a conference via
phone or computer), “televangelism” (evangelism
on television), and “telemarketing” (selling over the
telephone).Entertainment As in previous decades, entertain-
ment and trends among youth affected the national
lexicon. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line fromThe
Terminator(1984), “I’ll be back,” replaced Douglas
MacArthur’s “I shall return” as a common comic re-
joinder at any unwanted departure. Probably the
most-used catchphrase from television was Mr. T’s
expression of contempt from the seriesThe A-Team:
“I pity the fool who... .” However, the most talked-
about linguistic trend of the 1980’s was that origi-
nated by “Valley girls,” a neologism itself that was in
some ways a misnomer, as it did not strictly apply toThe Eighties in America Slang and slogans 881