launch.
“Launch” has become a vogue word when used in the sense “to begin, initiate” — e.g.:
o “USAir Chairman Seth Schofield . . . is visiting Pittsburgh to launch a new service to Mexico City today.” Steve Creedy, “Travel Agents Slap Airlines over Fee Caps,” Pitt. Post-Gaz., 15 Feb. 1995, at F1.
o “DuPage County is launching an innovative ‘last chance’ educational initiative for students expelled from school because of drug selling.” Casey Banas, “Last Chance Offered to Kids Facing Expulsion,” Chicago Trib., 12 Feb. 1997, at D1.
The related noun {the first launch in California will be in San Diego} is much the same.
For information about the Language-Change Index click here.
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Quotation of the Day: “[N]o branch of a publisher’s organization is as understaffed — qualitatively as well as quantitatively — as the unsolicited-manuscript department. The pay for first readers in many houses isn’t much higher than for bookkeeper assistants or even for shipping clerks. Many publishers, on those infrequent occasions when they take their hair down, will confess that they have virtually written off their unsolicited-manuscript department as expendable, returning submitted works on the basis of a cursory examination by a forty-dollar-a-week reader.” Norman Cousins, “In Defense of a Writing Career” (1950), in The Writer and His Craft 259, 264 (Roy W. Cowden ed., 1956).
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