Word: american
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...soldiers bent on "doing their thing." Promotions, awards and coveted rear-area assignments are too often slow in coming the black soldiers' way, however well they fight or however high their proportion of casualties. Some 13% of battle deaths are black, while Negroes make up 11.1% of the American population and 9.2% of the military...
...MODERN American speech, while not always clear or correct or turned with much style, is supposed to be uncommonly frank. Witness the current explosion of four-letter words and the explicit discussion of sexual topics. In fact, gobbledygook and nice-Nellyism still extend as far as the ear can hear. Housewives on television may chat about their sex lives in terms that a decade ago would have made gynecologists blush; more often than not, these emancipated women still speak about their children's "going to the potty." Government spokesmen talk about "redeployment" of American troops; they mean withdrawal. When...
...fundamental intent is to deceive. As Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf has pointed out, the structure of a given language determines, in part, how the society that speaks it views reality. If "substandard housing" makes rotting slums appear more livable or inevitable to some people, then their view of American cities has been distorted and their ability to assess the significance of poverty has been reduced. Perhaps the most chilling example of euphemism's destructive power took place in Hitler's Germany. The wholesale corruption of the language under Nazism, notes Critic George Steiner, is symbolized by the phrase...
...could argue that American English is under siege from linguistic falsehood, but euphemisms today have the nagging persistence of a headache. Despite the increasing use of nudity and sexual innuendo in advertising, Madison Avenue is still the great exponent of talking to "the average person of good upbringing"-as one TV executive has euphemistically described the ordinary American-in ways that won't offend him. Although this is like fooling half the people none of the time, it has produced a handsome bouquet of roses by other names. Thus there is "facial-quality tissue" that is not intended...
...polling places, there were some who seemed obviously out of place. Amidst the somberly dressed mountain folk of the world's oldest (founded A.D. 301) and tiniest (24 sq. mi.) republic were a number of men in aloha shirts and women with bouffant hairdos, looking like so many American tourists who had wandered into the wrong queue...