AREA 47

SECTION 149: TURBO-PHRASE  

+Warning: Turbo-Phrase Lists contain Extremely Offensive Terms!+

+Proceed At Your Own Risk!+

List Zero (Patient Zero)

Maximum meaning in minimum time and space.

Before there was WORDLAB, there was TURBO-PHRASE.

Some phrases are electric with emotion. 

Some words jolt with image.

Who was it who said that Art Is An Arrest Of Attention In The Midst Of Distraction?  (This is a test!)

These Lists are probably going to get me in trouble.  So what else is new?  This is a Writer’s Resource.  It deliberately goes "Too Far."  It will, and should, offend most readers.  That's beside the point; this is a tool-kit not meant to be read, but rather utilized.  There are potty-mouth characters who know nothing of politically correct.  When the Bad Guy bumps his head, he doesn't say, "Tush."  When a white-trash Southern peckerwood tells a joke involving an African-American Lawyer, he isn't going to phrase it that way.

According to Georges Polti there are exactly Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations.  You can quibble with his numbers, but it’s hard to get away from the Main Point: There Ain’t Any New Plots.  It’s all been said before.

My theory is that writers Succeed or Fail at the Sentence Level.  Regardless of how great your Message is, if you can’t hold me sentence to sentence, I’m Gone!

Phrases—even single words—come in Flavors: phrases can resonate, like a drop of honey on a tongue, or like a splash of Tabasco. 

Find a phrase you need?  Fine!  Take it!  But it's probably been used before.  The REAL utility of this collection of expressions is to Spark your own Creativity.  When you take a phrase like, Slow Train Coming, and twist it into your own custom expression—Fast Plane Landing—That’s Graduation Day!

These lists are not organized into categories or alphabetized because I have found that browsing through the list RAW works better for jump-starting the WRITING.

List Zero is tame, it's just the initial page of words that infected me with the idea.  Then, some would say I took a wrong turn.  The novel I was working on at the time had a pimp and the prostitute who kills him (justifiable homicide?) as major characters, and I was trying to get the hang of Street Talk.  Some would say I got a little carried away on the other Turbo-Phrase Lists.

Turbo-Phrase List Zero

(Patient Zero)

co-star
rolling stone
filmmaker
fiction
cosmos
rush
thrust
spread your wings

full color sound

clean
sip
deal-crazed
bomb
cold and electric

muscles and drugs

meditation
election-year
rockpile
album chart
thinking cap
mpg
lost legend
death of disco

bedrock beat
gaping hole
ticket sales
bolt
tube amp
solid state
rms
blame is cast
new wave
splinter
forecast
bugaboo
the bottom line

quartz
revised and updated

ten steps closer

latest LP
album
back pages
independent suspension
favor
nutshell

deliver
short story
novel
naked ladies
playground
idolmaker
stiff finger
red alert
compare prices

out of the blue

beat crazy
police
wow and flutter

no gimmicks

vintage
high bias
death and art

awesome
criminal compulsion

destiny
duel
raise your sights

interview
blues deluxe

skin deep
knife-edge
on the platter

new idea
threaten
the low and the mighty

first with the pros

subversive
dragons of Eden

slow train coming

diamond sky

loose talk
the sixties
destinations

shark hunt
master quality

last look
a bit of ’99
painful parallels

bitter song
first gig

time in stir

x-ray

spoon-shaped plastic

free-spending infinity

boat people

white-collar melodrama

test yourself

fantasy object

fund-raising muscle

mellowed out

face down
close-cropped New Wave

waste of vinyl

hard-core

quicksilver
leather-wrapped

drive train
basis of looks alone

5-speed
touch of magic

black month
election-year madness

crowds of angry

oval office

T-shirts

captain Kennedy

memories are made
try one buy one blues

tragicomic zing

backstage pass

romance dance

pillow fight

things that fade

under the game

keen minds

revolver

mobile fidelity

middle man

spark new life

within BB-range

pelvic fun