Word: fours
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MODERN American speech, while not always clear or correct or turned with much style, is supposed to be uncommonly frank. Witness the current explosion of four-letter words and the explicit discussion of sexual topics. In fact, gobbledygook and nice-Nellyism still extend as far as the ear can hear. Housewives on television may chat about their sex lives in terms that a decade ago would have made gynecologists blush; more often than not, these emancipated women still speak about their children's "going to the potty." Government spokesmen talk about "redeployment" of American troops; they mean withdrawal. When...
...notes: "It never seems to 'technically adjust' upward." The student New Left, which shares a taste for six-syllable words with Government bureaucracy, has concocted a collection of substitute terms for use in politics. To "liberate," in the context of campus uproars, means to capture and occupy. Four people in agreement form a "coalition." In addition to "participatory democracy," which in practice is often a description of anarchy, the university radicals have half seriously given the world "anticipatory Communism," which means to steal. The New Left, though, still has a long way to go before it can equal...
...liberalization of language in regard to sex involves the use of perhaps a dozen words. The fact of their currency in what was once known as polite conversation raises some unanswered linguistic questions. Which, really, is the rose, and which the other name? Is "lovemaking" a euphemism for the four-letter word that describes copulation? Or is this blunt Anglo-Saxonism a dysphemism for making love? Are the old forbidden obscenities really the crude bedrock on which softer and shyer expressions have been built? Or are they simply coarser ways of expressing physical actions and parts of the human anatomy...
...these approaches?until and unless negotiations with the Arabs begin. For the present, the occupation issue scarcely figures in electoral politics. Elections for seats in the Knesset will take place next month, and Mrs. Meir is practically certain of victory. But her successor may well be determined four years from now by a combination of personality and approach to the occupied territories...
...Meir is in good health and plans to serve the four-year term to which she is almost certain to be elected. Nevertheless she is grooming Deputy Premier Allon, 50, a loyal, Oxford-educated party man, as her successor. Dayan, 54, will undoubtedly fight for the job too, but Mrs. Meir considers him a maverick unsuited for the top. To broaden Allon's experience, Mrs. Meir is thinking of making him Foreign Minister, a job now held by the mellifluous Abba Eban. In turn, Eban, 54, would become Information Minister, charged with improving Israel's image...