Word: canting
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...surprisingly, the conservative Buckley has a lingering nostalgia for the Latin liturgy of old. Dripping scorn, he describes a nuptial Mass celebrated "according to the current cant, with everybody popping up and kneeling down." To Buckley, the jazzed-up ritual with its implicit boosterism ("Who do we appreciate--Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!") is "awful." In fairness, though, he could have mentioned some of the Tridentine excrescences that led to the Second Vatican Council's reforms: hymns of stunning vapidity and priests muttering their way through Low Mass with the graceless speed of tobacco auctioneers...
...cant go through there," shouts an officer at a woman slithering around the barrier in hopes of gaining access to Littauer--a building in the exact opposite direction from the site of the speech. The woman objects, but the cop's not caving. Once you put the police in charge, it seems, there's no room left for a sensible, case-by-case approach to these kinds of situations: the rules are the rules, and that's that...
...Stephen Covey, on the other hand, has the format down cold. His genius is for complicating the obvious, and as a result his books are graphically chaotic. Charts and diagrams bulge from the page. Sidebars and boxes chop the chapters into bite-size morsels. The prose buzzes with the cant phrases--empower, modeling, bonding, agent of change--without which his books would deflate like a blown tire. He uses more exclamation points than Gidget...
...great transformation of the communist system proceeds in the painful effort to create a system that works. Last week Jiang Zemin was the latest leader to order a retreat from one of the ideology's sacred tenets: state ownership of industry. Although he cloaked his decision in the semantic cant of "socialism with Chinese characteristics," the change he has ordered is nothing less than the last major step toward Chinese-style capitalism. Beijing will sell off the bulk of the nation's virtually broke state enterprises. Call it what they may, that's still privatization...
...that his Jerry is the whole show. Gooding's Tidwell can talk truth as well as trash. Funny and flamboyant as he is, he's a ferocious exponent of family values, stated with a lack of cant. He has a lot to teach Jerry about loyalty and its rewards...