Word: canting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...keep out of his voice. It is the voice of a man with no patience for poetry (he confesses that when he staged Archibald MacLeish's J.B. he simply moved the actors whenever he was bored, which was approximately every three lines) and no patience for ideological impositions, intellectual cant or institutional stability. It is perhaps a peasant's voice, valuing survival above all. But surely it is an actor's voice, one that knows it is impossible -- and finally maddening -- to play the same role the same way day after day. However you value the life it recounts, that...
...that, simply, is all that the CIA is supposed to do. To call the CIA a "reprehensible" body because of its "secretive" nature and "history of undermining the foreign policy aims of our nation's elected representatives as well as basic international law" is unsupported cant. No such examples are given because there are none to offer...