How is it that, having said become instinct all their lives, people suddenly start to say go extinct? I use this as an example. I can understand the acquisition or disposal of a piece of slang, such as cool. It might have been possible for a young thing in the 1950s who looked on the enemy as ‘squares’ to say something like, ‘I am just one cat in a world of cool cats,’ as Norman Mailer did in 1957.

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