Word: boom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Both Democrats and Republicans are jealously eyeing the votes of baby boomers, who do not, as a rule, share all the values or the goals of the religious right. "The key word for 1988 is tolerance," insists Republican Strategist Roger Stone. A fellow analyst of baby-boom voters, George Bush's strategist Lee Atwater says that whoever succeeds Reagan will have to emulate him: "Reagan won the baby-boom vote in 1984 because he projected tolerance. They did not think that Reagan would impose his personal views on them. A Republican can afford to be more conservative on social issues...
...current atmosphere does seem to be part of a national retrenchment from the giddy permissiveness of the '60s and '70s. As the baby-boom generation settles into respectable middle age, many of the trends associated with it are in decline: singles bars seem to be on the wane, promiscuity is becoming a fickle memory. The sexual revolution, which celebrated polymorphous diversity, ended with cruel jolts: first herpes, then AIDS. Says Michael Novak, a social philosopher at the American Enterprise Institute: "The coming theme for the liberal society is virtue and character. In its youth liberal society could claim that...
This combination of money and technology, show biz and sex appeal strikes many foreigners as the epitome of the American success story, and so they adopt English words that imply success itself: super, blue chip, boom, status symbol, summit. Some of that, clearly, is just snobbery. Through U.S. television, says British Grammarian Randolph Quirk, a foreigner can pick up an Americanized vocabulary "if you want to show you're with it and talking like Americans, the most fashionable people on earth." On the other hand, some upper-class Egyptian youths think it is chic to use Anglo-Saxon four-letter...
...society, vastly expanding the American sense of pluralism and possibility. Old rigidities collapsed, though not without a struggle. The '60s introduced a new experimental spirit in American life and business. The decade when institutions and old leadership and the past lost their legitimacy is paying off now. The baby-boom generation has inevitably lost youthful fire, but carries into maturity its instinct for improvisation...
...sitting on the porch of her thatched hut in a United Nations encampment two miles inside Thailand last week, when the shells began to come in. "I heard a long whistle in the sky--then boom!" she said later. Sad Rod was one of 59 Khmer Rouge refugees wounded, and her four-year-old daughter was among eleven people killed, in an unusually savage attack by Vietnamese forces inside Kampuchea...