Word: cliches
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...increase over 1960. This surge has made suburbanites the largest group in the land, outnumbering both city dwellers and those who live in rural areas. So many Americans have already achieved the suburban goal that suburbia itself has undergone a mutation. Inevitably, the new migrants have undone the cliché image of an affluent. WASPish. Republican hotbed of wife swappers. In the suburban myth, all men are button-down commuters, swilling one martini too many in the bar car of the 5:32. Frustrated women spend their days driving from station to school to supermarket to bridge club. The kids...
...Mackerel Plaza), elaborated more darkly in John Cheever's Bullet Park. The stereotype was neither wholly wrong nor wholly accurate. But those who have taken the trouble to look carefully have recognized that suburbia has been steadily changing. Today the demographic realities are radically different from the cliché, a change that is clearly documented in a TIME-Louis Harris survey of more than 1,600 suburban Americans in 100 different communities across the land...
...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...