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Microwave
Oven A time-saving kitchen appliance that doubles as a containment device for exploding chickens and small household pets. |
Middle America
The vast mid-region of the American land and spirit; a happy valley unclouded by ideas, romance, art or poignancy, and therefore hospitable to the proliferation of shopping malls, twig-shaded housing tracts, power mowers and acres of wall-to-wall carpeting. |
Middle Class
The vanishing breed of comfortable, unpretentious burghers who dominated the scene at mid-century, when, according to several reliable reports, a single moderate income would actually buy a presentable house in the suburbs - with money left over for an estate car, school fees, Austin Reed suits for Dad and homemade dresses for Mum. |
Midlife Crisis
The sickening realization, usually at the onset of middle age, that we've spent the past twenty years buttoning up into the wrong buttonholes. |
Militant
A political beggar with the attitude of a generalissimo. |
Mime
A harmless public nuisance whose silence creates a pretence of profundity for crowds of onlookers who pretend to enjoy the show. |
Minimalism
The anorexic sensibility as perpetrated on late twentieth-century literature, music, painting and sculpture; pallid humourless art that shuns exuberance as a vegetarian shuns roast beef. |
Minimum Security Prison
A residential athletic club for white-collar criminals, who enjoy a better standard of living in captivity than the average ghetto-dweller does at liberty. |
Minority Group
Any social class whose members feel they have less power than they deserve, and which, when added to all other such groups, amounts to 100 per cent of the population. |
Miracle
A report of a holy visage appearing on the window blind or of a marketing manager reading Shakespeare for pleasure. |
