"I was the last one picked in gym class" has become cultural shorthand for how PE can lower self-esteem.

Polo players on horseback, giant swishes and geometric medallions are elements in a cultural shorthand: invoked in novels, placed in movies, inscribed on clothing.

Hedge funds have become the new cultural shorthand for fast money.

Images of fire escapes have long been used to depict inner-city life, a cultural shorthand for cramped apartments and blistering summers.

The term "Kallikak" became, along with "Jukes" and "Nams" (other case studies of similar natures), a cultural shorthand for the rural poor in the South and Northeast United States.

It's a brand, but it's also cultural shorthand, like BMW or Mercedes-Benz.

It is a brand, of course, but it is also cultural shorthand, like BMW or Mercedes-Benz.

Names like Cézanne, Flaubert, Mayakovsky and Montesquieu are sprinkled throughout, in a kind of cultural shorthand, as if their very names opened intellectual vistas.

This is a cultural shorthand taken from the passage of the now-lost Classic of Burial recorded in Guo Pu's commentary:

Though Berkeley still qualifies for many as cultural shorthand for hippie holdovers, it is Oakland, after all, where California's former Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown, is the activist mayor.