|
Wilderness Area
Primary source of the raw material for junk mail, tabloids, romance novels, user's manuals, toilet tissue and this dictionary. |
Wildlife Management
The periodic massacre of formerly endangered animals that have lately enjoyed unexpected success in their amorous activities. |
Wimp
Another of society's terms of abuse for a gentle man. |
Wine
Aged grape juice regarded as a collectible by connoisseurs, and foolishly consumed by Europeans for the mellow glow that it is said to impart. |
Wiretap
A form of electronic eavesdropping that kept M.I.5 officials entertained in the era before telephone-sex hot lines. |
Witch-hunt
An often brutal investigation carried out with the intention of rounding up social and political subversives; a technique loudly decried because it tends to capture more friends-of-witches than witches. |
Women's Movement
How feminists proved that the members of their sex could be every bit as self-centred and humourlessly career obsessed as their male counterparts. |
Women's Studies
The academic discipline devoted to an emerging ethnic group noted for quaint folk traditions like needlepoint and witchcraft. |
Workaholic
Someone addicted to a hallucinogen called worka-hol, which grotesquely distorts the importance of one's efforts at the office and shrinks everything else - earth, ocean, art, poetry, love, music, wine, watermelon and chronic domestic squabbles -into pale and permanent irrelevance. |
Working Class
Those who labour in the bowels of industry, assuming they can still find a bowel that will employ them; sturdy, genial, beer-drinking folk whose personal value system would never allow them to set foot in a wine bar. |
