Word: fogged
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WAIF & SAFE. H. L. Mencken called attention to the native U.S. talent for "reducing complex concepts to starkest abbreviations." From O.K. to K.O., Americans have long coined initial-born words. But what began as playful sport has turned into contagion and verbal smog (smoke and fog). Just to describe the new rash of alphabetease, linguists were forced to invent a new word: acronym (from the Greek akros for tip, onyma for name), which first appeared in dictionaries in 1947. Most insidious breeders are public relations experts, adept at spawning the punch word that sums up an organization, then...
...rescue the survivors. At the same time, most recognized that the ransom payments were humiliating to the U.S. There could be general agreement that the Kennedy Administration had bungled the whole business-because it gave the Government's stamp of approval to the deal, then tried to fog over the official U.S. role in the matter...
Faint hope stirred in some corners: the Nashville Tennessean mused that "some of the fog can be cleared away as the heads of two friendly and allied states talk things over in an atmosphere of reason." But in Europe there were no illusions at all. William Randolph Hearst Jr., setting out on one of his journalistic junkets, sensed a "European atmosphere of doubt about the wisdom of the trip and misgivings about its outcome." And the French press was plainly not enthusiastic. "It would be vain to hope." editorialized Paris' Le Monde, "that the discussion magically ends the differences...
Amid the soft fog of irresolution that settled on the Kennedy Administration after the Cuba disaster, some vague and scattered signs of clearing were visible last week. "We're on the brink of a lot of things now," said a high-up White House aide. At a vacation retreat in Palm Beach, President Kennedy pondered a speech he plans to make within a few weeks calling for added defense expenditures and for a deeper spirit of sacrifice among the people. Vice President Lyndon Johnson sped out to faraway Saigon to deliver to President Ngo Dinh Diem a top-secret...
...bear penalties for his mistakes and expects rewards for his achievements--who looks at the universe with the fearless eagerness of a child, knowing it to be intelligible--who demands straight lines, clear terms, precise definitions--who stands in full sunlight and has no use for the murky fog of the hidden, the secret, the unnamed, the furtively evocative, for any code of signals from the psycho-epistemology of guilt...