Word: cliched
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...then, does one rescue language? How are words repaired, put back in shape, restored to accuracy and eloquence, made faithful again to the commands of the mind and the heart? There is, sadly enough, no easy answer. Sincerity is of little help to clichés, even in a suicide note, as Aldous Huxley once remarked. Read, if you can, the Latinized techno-pieties of most ecologists. Good intentions are not likely to produce another Shakespeare or a Bible translation equivalent to that produced by King James' bench of learned men. They wrote when English was young, vital...
...presented pretty much in their own words. The result often brings to mind Nancy Mitford's unkind remark that citizens of the U.S. speak English as if wrestling with a foreign tongue. That confronts the thoughtful pro-Jones reader with a dilemma. If Jones takes these clichés seriously, can he be any smarter than the people he writes about? If he doesn't, can he-pure commerce aside-be taken seriously...
...attempt to see history through Indian eyes, Brown liberally enlists the embittered eloquence of the Indians themselves. Following the cliché, most of them actually do speak "with heavy hearts" about their betrayals. Some, like Chief Joseph of the Nez Percés. are sharply ironic. "We do not want churches," he told a white agent. "They will teach us to quarrel about God. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about...
...current cliché from the political lexicon-"the people's right to know"-marks the battlefield but does not exactly illuminate it. This lofty phrase was first used a quarter of a century ago by the late Kent Cooper, then executive director of the Associated Press. "It means," he explained, "that the Government may not, and the newspapers and broadcasters should not, by any method whatever, curb delivery of any information essential to the public welfare and enlightenment." The Constitution, as it happens, does not provide for any such right. The courts, moreover, have never interpreted the First Amendment...
...cliches are worn but enduring: Italian Catholics seldom go to church but worship the Pope. German Catholics are fond enough of church, but mostly in terms of the family and the home: the good German hausfrau is supposed to dedicate herself with equal concern to Kinder, Kuche and Kirche-children, kitchen and church. Now two new polls-a major study of Catholics in Rome and a massive poll of West German Catholics-challenge the validity of the old clichés. Germans show a deeper spiritual sensitivity and more concern for their fellow man than they are generally given credit...