Word: epithets
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Like any other seasoned writer, Buchanan spends time not only on what he says but also on how he says it; he searches for the tangy phrase, the sticky epithet, the cartoonish image that will lodge in voters' minds and either inspire or terrify them: When he attacked the nomination of Dr. Henry Foster as Surgeon General, it was because "you can't have an abortionist as America's family doctor." On the stump, Department of Education employees become "some guy in sandals and beads...telling us how to teach American history," and the Democrats are "the party of national...
...murder trial of O.J. Simpson was once again awash in the racial animus of former L.A.P.D. detective Mark Fuhrman. A series of witnesses vividly testified before the jury about the detective's vocal hatred of blacks and his repeated use of the epithet nigger. Fuhrman was dramatically dragooned back into the courtroom, where (with the jury absent) he invoked his privilege against self-incrimination when asked about his truthfulness and the possible planting of evidence in the case. At the behest of the prosecution, an appeals court reversed a ruling issued by Judge Lance Ito that would have allowed...
...instances--in which ex-L.A.P.D. detective Mark Fuhrman used the word nigger on a screenwriter's interview tapes. The decision enraged Simpson's defense lawyers, who had been counting on the tapes to bolster their contention that Fuhrman--who denied on the stand that he had used the epithet--is a racist who planted the famous bloody glove at Simpson's home in order to frame him. Earlier in the week, with the jury absent, many more excerpts from the tapes were played for a shocked courtroom; spectators heard Fuhrman boast, in unrelentingly vile language, of beating suspects...
...singer-songwriters. Since the Beatles and Bob Dylan, this is the rule: if you don't write, you're no artist. "Vocal interpreter" used to be an honorable job description--good enough for Crosby, Sinatra, Ella, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, who wrote little of their own material. Now the epithet is often a slur. It suggests a lounge singer crooning Can You Feel the Love Tonight...
...Newt, the Washington evoked in Alan Brinkley's masterly The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Alfred A. Knopf; 371 pages; $27.50) seems like another planet. In the late 1930s and '40s, the word liberal was a badge of honor, not an epithet. Federal officials castigated "economic royalists," denounced predatory monopolists and seemed to regard the words free enterprise as a cloak for corporate exploitation. Big Business, not Big Government, was seen by Americans as the source of economic injustice...