Word: distractive
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Carl Stokes has said that providing housing, clothing and food for the poor should take precedence over finding ways to combat air and water pollution. Says Richard Hatcher, black mayor of Gary, Ind.: "The nation's concern with environment has done what George Wallace was unable to do: distract the nation from the human problems of black and brown Americans...
Guardian Role. A factor in many of the "accidents" was a maternal ambivalence toward the burned child. Of the 46 mothers involved in the study, 44 were preoccupied at the time with some "unresolved problem" that tended to distract them from their guardian role. Nineteen, for instance, confessed that they had not wanted to bear the child who had been burned. Twenty-one classified their attitude toward their husbands as "distant, indifferent or hostile." Only three in the control group felt that...
...wound up a case several years ago with a massive sweep of his arm, lost his balance, and tumbled headfirst into the jury box. Another attorney in the state was blind, and after finishing his presentations, used to make his Seeing-Eye dog do cute tricks in order to distract the jury from what opposing lawyers were saying...
Adults who yearn to clip the nation's longhairs keep running into a formidable obstacle: the U.S. Constitution. Take the school officials in Williams Bay, Wis., who insist that boys with shoulder-length locks distract other students from their studies. Last year the officials ordered two hairy boys, Thomas Breen, 17, and James Anton, 19, to get , haircuts or get expelled. Spurning both choices, the shaggy ones asked a federal district court to declare the order unconstitutional. When the court obliged, the would-be clippers continued their fight right up to the Supreme Court...
Last week the high court, perhaps too concerned with hairier matters, refused to hear the Wisconsin case and let the lower court rulings stand. The result is a victory for individuality. According to the district court, the Wisconsin school officials failed to prove that longhairs truly distract other students in this hirsute era. As to whether long hair expresses something offensive to others, the court reasoned, that something is still within the First Amendment. Shagginess is not obscenity, for example. Said the court: "Freedom to wear one's hair at a certain length or to wear a beard...