Word: blunt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Deafen the audience. Cudgel it severely about the ears with a blunt amplifying instrument. A hard-rock Modcom musical gives a theatergoer an acoustic third degree. His eardrums are refunded on the sidewalk. However, the test of a good musical score remains unvarying: not whether one can hum the songs but whether one can tell them apart. Hair has a beguilingly individuated score; Salvation does...
...leader in ideology and revolutionary pratique was the German SDS. Convinced that Advanced Industrial Society had developed a complex system to integrate and blunt all opposition within it, they concluded that participation in parliamentary elections, worker-employer councils, student-faculty committees, cte., was all a-big sham. The owners of the big enterprises and the politicians still made the decisions, only "consulting" the people from time to time. To destroy this false impression of participation and open a breech in the system of integration, the political action of SDS became a "refus organisee...
...drugs. To help schools encourage such values, new drug curriculums are slowly replacing the venerable and largely ineffective assembly scare lecture. The programs that seem to have helped most are seminars where kids and their parents can talk out the enticements and dangers of drug use?often with the blunt help of ex-addicts barely older than the kids in school. The meetings expose underlying tensions very rapidly. Wayne Wilson, a psychologist who has helped former addicts set up education programs in several California communities, reported to a recent conference on drug abuse held at Rutgers University: "When we first...
From a Greek word meaning "to use words of good omen," euphemism is the substitution of a pleasant term for a blunt one-telling it like it isn't. Euphemism has probably existed since the 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...
...perhaps a dozen words. The fact of their currency in what was once known as polite conversation raises some unanswered linguistic questions. Which, really, is the rose, and which the other name? Is "lovemaking" a euphemism for the four-letter word that describes copulation? Or is this blunt Anglo-Saxonism a dysphemism for making love? Are the old forbidden obscenities really the crude bedrock on which softer and shyer expressions have been built? Or are they simply coarser ways of expressing physical actions and parts of the human anatomy that are more accurately described in less explicit terms? It remains...