Word: cante
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...confronted the hugeness of the task facing his crumbling empire. Shortly after taking power, Doder and Branson report, Gorbachev embraced an aide's suggestion that he study Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People; as a result, his public style was transformed. He abandoned the cant of Marxism and brusquely told opponents...
...itself, absurdity is hardly a newcomer on the German political scene. For the better part of 30 years, unification had been an article not of faith but of cant. Nobody took it seriously, nobody believed in it, and in the West at least, there was hardly anyone who really wanted it. One Chancellor after another talked about it absentmindedly, rather like an old lady reciting her Rosary, a performance that became even more embarrassing when the red carpet was rolled out during Erich Honecker's state visit in Bonn...
Hochschild thinks "pro-family" legislation is needed, not to promote school prayers and cut off birth-control funds, as in the cant of the Reagan years, but to equalize women's wages and provide family leave for both sexes. Tax breaks would go to firms that allow job sharing and flextime, and to developers who build affordable housing with communal meal-preparation facilities. (A problem she does not mention is that many employers do encourage part-time work, often as a way to avoid paying for medical insurance and other benefits.) Using the phrase of another sociologist, the author calls...
...keep pigs to the nosy, noisy maid whose fractured syntax includes the news that an acquaintance is a patient at "Mount Cyanide." In Santeiro's shrewdest insight, the villain is not a religious humbug but a larcenous Lothario masquerading as an embodiment of the work ethic, and the cant he peddles is based on an immigrant assimilationist version of the American Dream...
...Cant phrases, such as "quality time," have found their way into the vocabulary. A motif of absence -- moral, emotional and physical -- plays through the lives of many children now. It may be an absence of authority and limits, or of emotional commitment. A mother writes in the New York Times: "What I see emerging is an entirely new category of professionals who spend little, if any, time with their children. There appears to be a new form of neglect: absence ... Recently my six-year-old daughter exclaimed, 'Look, Mom, Sarah has a new babysitter.' The 'babysitter' was Sarah's mother...