Word: distortion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Words can be impregnated with feeling by oversimplification. People who oppose all abortions distort the position of those favoring freedom of private choice by calling them proabortion. And many a progressive or idealist has experienced the perplexity of defending himself against one of the most peculiar of all disparaging terms, do-gooder. By usage in special contexts, the most improbable words can be infused with extraneous meaning. To speak of the "truly needy" as the Administration habitually does is gradually to plant the notion that the unmodified needy are falsely so. Movie Critic Vincent Canby has noticed that...
...Ronald Reagan's favorite rhetorical devices is the vivid example-a "welfare queen" ripping off the system, a school lunch program providing meals to affluent children-that purports to exemplify a pervasive national problem. Such anecdotage, critics claim, tends to oversimplify and distort complex situations. But the device was turned against the Administration last week when CBS News used emotion-charged tales to make the case that some of the nation's truly needy are falling through the social safety net. "Hunger in America is back," said CBS Commentator Bill Moyers in his introduction to the hour-long...
PERSONAL AND SEXUAL politics, rather than corporate ones, tease and distort the audience's expectations in the evening's second play, Bonnie Salomon's Who's the Fool Now? which takes its inspiration from the true story of a writer who commits suicide. Anyone expecting a letdown from Cradle's shuttering close should be not only pleasantly surprised but downright rolled up by a play that is satisfyingly complex and refreshingly free of the problems to which first plays by undergraduates are liable to fall prey...
...thirds of the world's tin production. Since 1956, they and other producers have had a series of five-year agreements with consuming nations to prevent price fluctuations and stabilize supplies. Last July, however, the consensus fell apart. The Reagan Administration, which does not like deals that distort free markets, declined to sign a new five-year contract...
...future looks bleak for the News. current rumor has it that it would cost the Tribune company $85 million to close down the paper and pay off its employees, while it would take $60 million to renovate the product for the long haul. But those numbers distort the picture. The News is written for part of New York that, while still huge by almost any standard, is shrinking; and American business does not stay in the games when the prizes keep getting smaller. Sooner or later, and probably earlier than most expect, the Daily News will join the Brooklyn Dodgers...