Word: callings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...would like to call your attention to an error in fact in your very fine article [Aug. 29] on new directions in the insurance industry...
...Soon after Martin Luther King was killed, crosses were burned at Danang and Cam Ranh Bay. Confederate flags still fly from barracks and trucks, and are even worn as shoulder patches on the uniforms of helicopter pilots stationed at Phu Loi. Black soldiers at Con Thien grimace when whites call a Negro sergeant "brown boy" and a mongrel puppy "soul man." Base club operators who accept country and western but not soul music from their entertainers have paid a toll. Clubs were wrecked in Chu Lai, Qui Nhon and a dozen other places in the past twelve months. Two white...
...have been elevated by image-conscious unions to the status of "custodians"; nowadays, a teen-age rock guitarist with three chords to his credit can class himself with Horowitz as a "recording artist." Cadillac dealers refer to autos as "preowned" rather than "secondhand." Government researchers concerned with old people call them "senior citizens." Ads for bank credit cards and department stores refer to "convenient terms"-meaning 18% annual interest rates payable at the convenience of the creditor...
...replaced with more "objective" terms. To speak of "morals" sounds both superior and arbitrary, as though the speaker were indirectly questioning those of the listener. By substituting "values," the concept is miraculously turned into a condition, like humidity or mass, that can be safely measured from a distance. To call someone "poor," in the modern way of thinking, is to speak pejoratively of his condition, while the substitution of "disadvantaged" or "underprivileged," indicates that poverty wasn't his fault. Indeed, writes Linguist Mario Pei in a new book called Words in Sheep's Clothing (Hawthorn; $6.95), by using...
...their prudery, the Victorians were considerably more willing than modern men to discuss ideas-such as social distinctions, morality and death -that have become almost unmentionable. Nineteenth century gentlewomen whose daughters had "limbs" instead of suggestive "legs" did not find it necessary to call their maids "housekeepers," nor did they bridle at referring to "upper" or "lower" classes within society. Rightly or wrongly, the Victorian could talk without embarrassment about "sin," a word that today few but clerics use with frequency or ease. It is even becoming difficult to find a doctor, clergyman or undertaker (known as a "mortician...