Design horrors: A drawing of the blood-spattered...

Design horrors: A drawing of the blood-spattered shower scene from the movie “Psycho” decorates one of the dresses entered in the Debut ’93 fashion show Thursday.

It’s the drop-dead creation of Lisa Temming, a student at the downtown Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising--and a student of horror movies.

“Lisa feels that clothes should have a sense of humor,” said Mary Stephens, the school’s Fashion Design chairwoman. “We like to give our students an opportunity to express their creativity, even if they know that when they go to work they’ll have to do salable clothing.”

Temming, one of several students entered in the Biltmore Hotel show, has designed some other dresses with horror movie motifs to be worn by models.

“She has the ‘Wolfman’ dress,” said Stephens, “the ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ dress, the ‘Birds’ dress. . . “

And then there’s the wedding ensemble--from “The Bride of Frankenstein.”

List of the Day: A few years ago, the linguistics students of UCLA Prof. Pamela Munro compiled the dictionary, “UCLA Slang,” which was later published by Random House. Given the lasting power of slang, Munro felt it was time for her students to return with “Slang II.”

Among the oddities they found is that one slang word derived from “The Flintstones” series-- fred (meaning jerk)-- has disappeared, while another-- betty (attractive)-- survives.

Some newcomers:

* Cow out--to lose control.

* F.B.--flirt openly (from flirtatious behavior).

* Grommet--child surfer or skateboarder.

* Hack on--to ridicule.

* H.B.R.--large proportion of stupid people (from high blonde ratio).

* Smell bacon--to sense the presence of the police.

* Wally--an awkward person.

One would think that USC would come out with a rival slang dictionary, if only to avenge the never-ending number of insults that UCLAans attach to their rival’s initials. Such as:

* USC: University of the Scholastically Challenged.

Whistling while we warred: There was, of course, no CNN to deliver around-the-clock coverage of the Spanish-American War. But The Times used what technology it had. Newspaper archivist Richard Robinson sent along a May, 1898, article announcing that The Times would blare coded messages with a whistle to keep passersby informed. Note the suggestion to paste the code “in your hat” (see excerpt).

A matchup we would never dream of: The singles section of a local weekly newspaper includes one ad that begins: “Eddie Haskell-type looking for Donna Reed. . . .” Eddie, the teen-age wise guy of TV’s “Leave It to Beaver?” Would a responsible housewife such as Donna go for Eddie? The guy was such a fred.

miscelLAny:

While a drill-bit salesman in the late 1940s, George Bush (remember him?) lived briefly in Huntington Park, Whittier, Compton and Ventura.