Word: fog
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...offer "The stop, hit and dump," "the blabberin' throw," "the 50-league hot foot," "the fog-rolling contest," "the frisk us thorough," "the Tito-totter balance" "the atom hoard jump," and "the high-hurdle delays...
...IRAN Fear In spite of the fondest hopes of the U.S. State Department, the Iran air showed no signs of clearing. Instead, the fog of fanaticism, misjudgment and threatening disaster continued to hang heavily over the strategic land and its strategic oilfields...
...Fog. Washington, with no clear Middle East policy to fall back on, huffed & puffed to blow the Iranian clouds away. The State Department issued a statement on the U.S. position: "We have stressed to the governments of both countries the need to solve the dispute in a friendly way through negotiation, and have urged them to avoid intimidation and threats of unilateral action...
Three days later it backslid, ran the headline: HEARINGS STRESS ACHESON UBIQUITY. Professor White, 33, spotted "ubiquity" as one of the thickest fog words, made a bet with John Crider, the Herald's chief editorial writer, that few readers knew what it meant. To prove it, White stood in front of the Boston Public Library and polled 72 passersby. His findings: only 19.4% correctly thought that "ubiquity" meant "everywhere-at-the-same-time"; most thought (by association with the name "Acheson") that it referred to "errors...
Confusion. White began making his collection of fog words last spring, by picking 25 sentences from New York and Boston newspapers. Sample sentence: "He has marshaled his oft-reiterated and unproved allegations to obfuscate and postpone decisions." White asked some 200 students and parents whether obfuscate meant reverse, change, confuse or rearrange. Only 23 knew it meant confuse Results were similar for such standbys as plebiscite, inculcate, anomaly, shibboleth, indigenous, cataclysms, aggrandizement tantamount, statutory, encroachment, implementation and peripheral...