Word: givens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...divided loyalties. Thus, says Lieut. Colonel Frank Peterson, the senior black officer in the Marine Corps, "the average black who has been here and goes back to the States is bordering somewhere on the psychotic as a result of having grown up a black man in America-having been given this black pride and then going back to find that nothing has changed...
...larger scale, though, the persistent growth of euphemism in a language represents a danger to thought and action, since its fundamental intent is to deceive. As Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf has pointed out, the structure of a given language determines, in part, how the society that speaks it views reality. If "substandard housing" makes rotting slums appear more livable or inevitable to some people, then their view of American cities has been distorted and their ability to assess the significance of poverty has been reduced. Perhaps the most chilling example of euphemism's destructive power took place in Hitler...
...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 the euphemism-creating ability of Government officials. Who else but a Washington economist would invent the phrase "negative saver" to describe someone who spends more money than...
While the failure of minorities to get any representation on the board has led the directors to establish an investigation of the current election procedure set forth in the by-laws, the issues and questions raised by the alternate slate have given birth to a second study under the Community and Operations Committee (COC), headed by Cornelius W. May, a third-year law student...
...Excuse me, I see that the engaging flow, such as it is, of this narrative- cum -expose has been interrupted. The "shee-it" is the voice of my freshman roommate, First you must understand that "freshman roommate" is itself a perjorative term-a curious phenomenon given the fact that, not only did most of us have one, most of us were one. Mine happened to be from Mississippi. ("No, white, " I would explain, with the appropriate tone of annoyance to my outraged relatives.) What was a nice boy from Boston doing with a roommate like that? The fault...