Word: avoiding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...beginning of language. As long as there have been things of which men thought the less said the better, there have been better ways of saying less. In everyday conversation the euphemism is, at worst, a necessary evil; at its best, it is a handy verbal tool to avoid making enemies needlessly, or shocking friends. Language purists and the blunt-spoken may wince when a young woman at a party coyly asks for directions to "the powder room," but to most people this kind of familiar euphemism is probably no more harmful or annoying than, say, a split infinitive...
...send a fighter up against a mountain slide. The fighter, swimming up from economic backwaters, is a supreme dolt and an exploited object of surface pity. Then comes the trainer, faithful as a mutt. Behind them all sits the omnipotent syndicate, whose generals eat pheasant under glass and meticulously avoid the sauce stains...
...further trouble to come between the Communist powers. "Their positions are so far apart," Javer Malo, Albania's ambassador to Paris, noted gloomily last week, "that one cannot dare to hope for a reconciliation." Perhaps the most that can be hoped for is that they will manage to avoid...
Please note, I am not saying that the university should avoid political stands; I am not saying that the university can fail to restructure or to break its ties with what is most evil in America. Those are political arguments...
Competitiveness and the making of comparisons are diseases of the imagination that come from being surrounded by people you see in bits and hear about in pieces. You can't look too long at anyone in a dorm: you have to keep circulating. You have to avoid real participation in the other people's lives: the way you do it is by talking. One would think that among all the talking going on in a Radcliffe dorm there must by the laws of probability be some of the stuff called intellectual conservation, though no one's really sure what that...