Word: cliches
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...words; they stare, uncomprehending, at simple declarative English. Leon Botstein, president of New York's Bard College, says with glum hyperbole: "The English language is dying, because it is not taught. " Others believe that the language is taught badly and learned badly because American culture is awash with clichés, officialese, political bilge, the surreal boobspeak of advertising ("Mr. Whipple please don't squeeze the cortex") and the sludge of academic writing. It would be no wonder if children exposed to such discourse grew up with at least an unconscious hostility to language itself...
...biggest since the Congress of Vienna" is already certain to become the enduring cliché about the Helsinki Conference. The glittering Vienna assembly of world leaders, who met in what was then Europe's most magnificent city after Paris, was far more resplendent than this week's Helsinki meeting promises to be. There are, however, many compelling, if superficial resemblances. In their own way both events can be seen as attempts to legitimize postwar balances of force in Europe-the one in the wake of the devastating Napoleonic Wars, the other a long-delayed sequel to the equally...
...rising crime rate, the breakdown of the cities and the crumbling of mass transportation. His view-widely welcomed at present-that Government should do less and that national thrift is in order could begin to seem to many people like a do-nothing policy. Along with this, "charisma"-a cliché not recently heard-might return to the political vocabulary...
...making of America was the unmaking of these clichés. Here it was discovered that no people was quite as peculiar as Old World nationalist leaders had urged them to believe. You became an American by coming to a strange land and learning to speak somebody else's language. Broken English would be the only tongue that really expressed our history. No wonder, then, that education became our national fetish, for the public schoolroom was the frontier of the mind, where children of older nations learned to speak a common language...
...make $100,000 a year or more from their looks. "You either have it or you don't," says Carrie Donovan of Harper's Bazaar. "A beauty must be able to project herself, be dramatic, an actress." Hollywood Starlet Deborah Raffin, 22, a lean blonde with almost cliché American looks, has projected herself with more effect on the covers of glossy magazines than in the movies. Picked at age 19 to play Liv Ullmann's daughter in 40 Carats, she also starred in the uproariously bad Once Is Not Enough. Deborah insists on being identified when...