Today’s Zits:
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(#1)
It’s been a slice, as a way of saying ‘it’s been good; goodbye’, was new to me. It’s in a few recent dictionaries of American slang / idioms, but not in Green’s Dictionary of Slang or (unsurprisingly) the OED; I have a citation from the late 1990s, but not (yet) anything earlier than that. And its origins are murky.
The 2007 Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions from McGraw Hill and the 2002 McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs both have the expression. And it appears in Disney’s animated Hercules (film in 1997, tv series in 1998), in this exchange between Hercules and Meg (Megara, who becomes his first wife):
(#2)
Meg, saying goodbye: “It’s been a real slice.”
There is speculation about the origins of the expression, which certainly looks like a truncation — so, possibly, from It’s been a slice of life, said in the same spirit as It’s been real. But I’ve found no occurrences of the full expression used as in #1, so for the moment this is pure speculation.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
