'Singles' at 30: Tired, Empty, Cliche

Cameron Crowe’s Seattle-set romantic comedy Singles premiered on September 18, 1992, almost exactly one year after the release of Nevermind and two months before a writer for The New York Times was gulled by a sarcastic Sub Pop intern into publishing a comprehensive “lexicon of grunge speak” combining suspiciously old-timey expressions (“dish;” “kickers”) with dubious new slang (“swinging on the flippety-flop”) — a sort of flannel-clad nadsat in need of a thorough decoding.