It’s 1991 now and the world is changed.

The world is different not only in the usual sense, as in the nightly news or Cher’s new boyfriend – the way we speak to each other has changed. The words we use are new or they mean other things. Even the four-letter ones.

Below is a list of words or terms that literate 90s kind of people need to master so as not to seem as if they have dropped in from another planet or a 70s drug high.

-album- A two-sided piece of graphic artwork made or cardboard and supported internally by a black vinyl disc. Formerly associated with sound recording.

-New Age music- Cliffs Notes for classical music. Rhymes with “sewage” when properly pronounced.

-infomercial- A half hour commercial (?!), usually broadcast after midnight. Infomercials are hot and are being considered by the Networks for the 1992 prime time lineup.

-Nintendo- A legal narcotic.

-savings and loans- Institutions whose main function is to persuade people to place their money and small valuables in their mattresses.

-song stylist- What a “Hollywood Squares” celebrity or Star Trek veteran becomes when put out to pasture.

-dolphin-free tuna- Preferential treatment based on the notion that only animals who pass a “smartass” test should be spared wanton slaughter. This is currently not applicable to humans.

-Greenhouse Effect- The effect of sunlight on a glass house enabling plants to grow in a warm environment.

-PC- “Politically correct”. This is the hot new fad in the college administration circuit, and an effective way of subverting the First Amendment.

-color, charm, strangeness- Characteristics of sub-atomic particles.

-Moe, Larry, Curly – Character models for sub-atomic particle theorists.

-Yuppie- What you call someone who like to own different name-brand, status-symbol, materialistic things than you do.

-redneck- The only acceptable “PC” derogatory racial stereotype.

-Communism- A failed socioeconomic theory whose last surviving adherents are found among American university faculty.

-nuclear winter – A theoretically effective but untried method of ending inflation, the savings and loan scandal, the Mideast crisis, the War On Drugs, the rising crime rate and sunburn.

-perestroika- A Russian idea for restructuring their country that is popularly received in every nation in the world except Russia.

-budget deficit- The first scientifically confirmed discovery of a black hole.

-oil- a dark, poisonous lubricant and fuel that has replaced democracy and freedom as the thing American soldiers must fight and die for.

-Vietnam- The most common subject of Hollywood movies in the last decade.

-Made In America- A term denoting an inferior imitation of a Japanese product.