Word: awkwardness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This steady torrent of dialogue creates some awkward moments. Conversations must be disassembled like Chinese boxes: " ' "My ex-wife," he said, "said the same thing," ' Locke said." At moments such as these, talk does indeed seem cheap. For all its laconic wit, The Judgment of Deke Hunter still teeters be tween the description of manners and the repetition of mannerisms. The characters are good fun to be around, but they never get more complicated than their last remark...
...growing independence and authority of women. Many people (not all of them men) would rather scrape their fingernails across a blackboard than hear such ugly and artificial neologisms especially when they are propounded on the unproved assumption that it will do some public good. But most new words seem awkward at first. Over the centuries the ones that survive do so only because they are useful-and the useful ones sound better as the years...
ANGLICANS (406). They are in an awkward spot, since their English-led clergy is tied by oath to the Crown. Their Toryism runs strong in the new Methodist movement and in the New England cities, less so in the Middle Colonies. Anglicans in the south generally favor independence. FRIENDS (307). The "Quakers," powerful in Pennsylvania, oppose all wars, including the Revolution. Their January meeting insisted on obedience to the King. Patriots distrust their pacifism but so far have done little against them. LUTHERANS (240). Located mostly in the Middle Colonies, these Germans, like Peter Muhlenberg, generally want to split from...
...shadow of Soweto will clearly hang over the Prime Minister's talks with Kissinger−one of those awkward summits that West German officials, in retrospect, probably wish could have been held elsewhere. Responding to threats of embarrassingly massive protests against Vorster and his government's apartheid policies, the Bonn government last week shifted the proposed site of the meeting from Hamburg to southern Bavaria. Kissinger and his 100-member retinue will be ensconced at the Hotel Sonnenhof in the picturesque village of Grafenau (pop. 4,000), deep in the Bayerischer Wald and about 13 miles from...
Soviet trials are decided not by jurors but by three court officials, a judge and two "people's assessors." In a case like that of Isaac Shkolnik, the Soviet authorities confronted an awkward problem. Wanting to emigrate to Israel is not, according to Soviet law, a crime, though it is disturbing to Soviet authorities since one emigre tends to encourage others to try to leave the supposed Socialist paradise. But if law is to have any general viability, its forms must be maintained. Hence charges of real, but uncommitted crimes had to be fabricated for would-be emigres. What...