Word: agnew
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fair, Agnew did not invent the guilt-by-verbal-association form of terminological confusion. Some years ago, the phrase "radical conservative" was used in both liberal and radical circles. This horrid hybrid, radical conservative, every bit as monstrous as radical liberal, was supposed to describe activist conservatives, such as members of the John Birch society, who were inclined to ideologize their principles and who exhibited some stylistic similarities to leftist radicals. People have called themselves "radical conservatives," meaning that their conservatism was fundamental and thoroughgoing. Similarly, a man might -though few, if any, have done so in recent years-call...
They order these matters better in the natural sciences. Chemistry would not have improved much since Lavoisier's youth if chemists were still loosely calling all combustible materials phlogiston. The word oxygen means what it means, and neither Humpty Dumpty nor Spiro Agnew can alter that. New things-or newly discovered things -need new names. When a new microorganism swims into the biologist's ken, he does not reach back into folklore and call it a "small dragon"; he quarries the lexicon of a very dead language and concocts, say, "staphylococcus," a word never known before on land...
...every beast of the field." Clearly, this indicates that inventing names was to be an important function of his race. Contemporary Adam, confronting the menagerie of his own political attitudes, says: "This one is a gryphon. That one is a unicorn." Or, like Spiro Agnew, he invents hybridized contradictions: "That one is a gryphon unicorn." Lexicographically speaking, this Eden is hell...
...Rafferty is to California education what Spiro Agnew is to national politics-a spellbinder of alliterative conservatism. Eight years ago, Rafferty swept the nonpartisan race for state Superintendent of Public Instruction by denouncing "permissive, pragmatic progressivism." He lost a loud bid for the Senate two years ago, but has since delighted his admirers by advocating mass searches for drugs in student lockers, by presenting guidelines for "moral instruction" that criticized pacifism, and by urging science teachers to give "equal time" to the Adam and Eve account of creation...
While the show was in rehearsal, the producers offered it to the Nixon Administration. Their premiere took place at a White House luncheon, and their next gig was a Memphis fund-raising banquet where they played opposite the va-va-va-voom rhetoric of Spiro Agnew. A follow-up Tennessee State Fair appearance was taped for presentation on the Ed Sullivan Show. All that will ultimately lead, Mann hopes, to an original-cast album, a cross-country tour and a weekly TV series. The whole prospect, he says, gives him goose pimples...