Word: epithet
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Reagan, abbreviating "oldest and wisest," an epithet that originated with Congressman Jack Kemp...
...received a lot of hate mail back then, letters from the deep south...and north, east, and west. "Braggart" was as nice as the letters got; "Uppity nigger" was the epithet written by others. The worst were, of course, unsigned. Anonymous. Ali never feared the signed letters. "A signed letter, that's one man. Anonymous, he's a million men," he once explained...
...Democratic Congresswoman from California lost a notoriously bitter U.S. Senate campaign in 1950 to a young Republican named Richard Nixon; of cancer; in Manhattan. The election battle, in which Nixon's attacks on his liberal opponent for being "soft on Communism" first earned him the epithet "Tricky Dick," ended Douglas' political career. She rarely spoke about her onetime foe afterward, but her husband, Actor Melvyn Douglas, was less reticent: "A little, sneaky kind of character...
Alan Dershowitz was quoted in The Crimson as saying that the two Quincy students who filed the complaint against the showing of "DeepThroat" were "feminist fascists." The use of such an epithet is inexcusable and wholly without justification. The fact that these women appear to be on the more restrictive side of the censorship issue than Dershowitz makes the epithet no more applicable to them than "male chauvinist anarchist" would...
Lately the word liberal has become something of a political epithet, meaning that the target is an impractical spendthrift. Kennedy's staff has taken to calling him a "pragmatist," which is supposed to convey the impression that he is a hard-headed problem solver not bound by any ideology. That definition, too, can be read in more than one way. Says an old Kennedy friend, conservative Republican Congressman Barber Conable of New York: "Ted is the son of Joe Kennedy and the brother of Jack and Bobby. Like them, he accommodates himself to the prevailing views...