I can remember lots of people referring to flip flops as “thongs”. Nowadays when you say “thong” people assume you’re talking about underwear. I guess what the have in common is that strap in the middle. The shoes have a strap that goes between your toes and the underwear has a strap that goes between your buns.
DWI stands for Driving While Impaired (not intoxicated). Impairment can be caused by any number of drugs. I have heard some argue that impairment can also cover lack of sleep or emotional disturbance. I’m pretty sure DUI was the older term because it specifically referred to alcohol and then we needed a more general term which included not just alcohol but also other drugs so we switched it to DWI.
I’m sure it goes back further than that. I remember Jim Varney saying ew in the 1987 comedy Earnest Goes to Camp. OED says first recorded use is 1967 but admits that ew has gained popularity in the 21st century.
I was trying to figure out when that happened, as I grew up with it being DUI as long as I remember being aware of the term (I was born in '75). Judging by the Chicago Tribune archive, it looks like around 1983, at least in this area.
New York has DWI (Driving while intoxicated) and DWAI (Driving with Ability Impaired). The latter is if you’ve been drinking, but your BAC is just below the legal definition of DWI. The statute specifically says the terms only apply to alcohol or drug impairment.
There was an attempt to create a separate category for Driving while Drowsy, but it was never passed into law. Some other states do have laws, but none group it into DUI, since they usually have different penalties.
When I was young, oh so many years ago, the rolling metal round things with tires on them were invariably called wheels, unless someone used a brand name such as Keystones or Cragars.
I’ve got a one-man crusade to add EW to the allowed Scrabble two-letter words. If OW is on there, EW should be! So far the crusade hasn’t gotten farther than the dining room.
Maybe sometimes a YOLO! is followed by a BOLO so it has replaced APB?
If you like to put symbolic stickers on your pogo stick, and one day you hear of a great bargain on buying multiples of them illegally, and you know it’s illegal but you go for it anyway, you might end up with YOLO BOGO pogo logo BOLO.
Ewwwwww.
Rims are what replaced hubcaps, not wheels. They may sometimes be used for the whole assembly, through synecdoche, but most users differentiate between them.
And my spell check doesn’t recognize synecdoche. I’m outraged!
See, to me a hubcap is yet another thing. It’s a wheel cover (although there is also some nitpicky difference between hubcaps and wheel covers if you get technical). If you look down on this page, all those decorative discs you see are what I would call “hubcaps.” I would not call those “rims,” though. You can pop them off and back in the day you used to find them on the side of the road from cars who lost them while hitting a pothole. Rims are the outer part of the wheel or the wheel itself.
Uh, not from my experience. All of these giant 22"+ diameter wheels called rims don’t even have wheel covers or hubcaps. Yes, they are calling the whole wheel a rim as you have stated. My experience is from hearing it from about a decade’s worth of high school kids always using the term rim in referring to car wheels.
Lots and lots of slang is local, YMMV. A quick search finds sellers offerings rims and wheels, but maybe street slang varies.
I did find an early example of eww, though.
On the first episode of The Jetsons, Jane goes shopping for a robot maid. The snooty salesman blanches when he hears that the family has a mere three bedroom apartment, no matter that was gigantic by 1962 standards. “Eww, a slum clearance project. So you’ll want to see our basic economy model.” He definitely says eww. It’s not supposed to be future talk, either; from context it’s just the way salesmen talk as they did contemporaneously.
Depends on the dictionary used to govern what is acceptable, Eew was only fairly recently accepted in SOWPODS, I don’t play TWL and who freakin knows what words with friends deems acceptable…
