Word: delphic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...space to rationalize. "A protective reaction strike is never having to say you're sorry." The strip was unmistakably anti-Nixon during Watergate, but also took whacks at the Ervin committee: The chair opens up the floor to innuendo and hearsay. In fact, Doonesbury is sometimes so Delphic that adherents of just about any point of view can find aid and comfort in it. For foes of school busing, there was a series in which a white boy in a newly integrated school is beaten up by blacks. Busing proponents, however, might note that the victim probably provoked...
Effective too is Leontes's occasional facial tic, and the moment when, as he says, "'Tis Polixenes has made thee swell thus," he violently grabs Hermione's burgeoning belly. After the Delphic oracle eventually proclaims Leontes a "jealous tyrant" and the others blameless, this Leontes even pulls out a dagger to stab himself and has to be restrained (incidentally, in the source from which Shakespeare took the story, the king does commit suicide...
...September 1941, calling the U.S. Army a "definite inconvenience," he urged a reduction in the armed forces and a step-up of economic aid to England and Russia. Harry Truman's upset victory in 1948 forced Lippmann to begin his next column with the pained and decidedly un-Delphic admission: "As one who did not foresee the result of the election...
...April 14, 1973, meeting among the President, John Ehrlichman (E) and H.R. ("Bob") Haldeman (H) at the Executive Office Building to discuss the spreading stain of Watergate, Nixon makes a truly Delphic utterance...
Some 300 years after a wandering Scottish mystic called "the Brahan Seer" made that Delphic statement, it is turning out to be almost literally true. The "black rain " is about to fall from a vast array of oil rigs in the North Sea. Not coincidentally, the country is undergoing the first widespread resurgence of nationalism in this century. One indicator of the new mood was the dramatic breakthrough scored in February's British elections by the Scottish National Party, a modest fringe group for most of its 40-year history. Claiming, among other things, that "it's Scotland...