Word: agnew
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...message was not new to the G.L.F. As Don Kilhefner, a G.L.F. local organizer in Los Angeles, had earlier said: "We are simply following the advice of President Nixon and Spiro Agnew to work within the electoral process...
WHEN I use a word," declared that famed semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, "it means just what I choose it to mean." He mitigated this tyrannical attitude by explaining that when he made a word do a lot of work, he always paid it extra. Spiro Agnew, who also has a highhanded way with words, owes a great deal of overtime pay to the phrase "radical liberal." As he employs the phrase, upon which he has turned his vigorous intervention in the current congressional campaign, radical liberal seems to be an elastic blanket covering a huge bed, strangely cohabited by "the northeastern...
...Agnew's radical liberal has no better credentials. Whatever the historical mutations of the two terms and despite the present vagueness of each, in current usage they do signify two quite different positions. Liberals think they have saved this and other societies from radicals, a claim that is neither wholly provable nor wholly refutable. The typical radical regards the liberal as a fink-a delicate and obsolete epithet that has been replaced in the radical vocabulary by a popular twelve-letter word. Today's liberal thinks today's society is worth mending and uses constitutional means...
...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...