Word: goodman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Goodman...
...scene was historical theater at its best, complete with tears, smiles and the unlikeliest of costars. There, standing in the White House Rose Garden and surrounded by beaming relatives, was Navy Lieut. Robert Goodman, dramatically home after a month in a Syrian jail. There was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Democratic presidential aspirant whose audacious diplomacy won Goodman his freedom. And there, in the middle, was Ronald Reagan, who a week earlier had declined to take Jackson's calls before the Baptist minister left for Damascus. But now the President graciously thanked the amateur envoy for his "personal mission...
Then Jackson was shuttled to a Damascus military compound. He was the P.O.W.'s second American visitor in a week: Ambassador Robert Paganelli had delivered Goodman a Christmas dinner...
...Federal Government launched a program last fall to gas chickens-more than 7 million so far-in an effort to contain an influenza virus in Pennsylvania, it said it had "depopulated" the birds. "We use that terrible word depopulation to avoid saying slaughter," explained a federal information officer, David Goodman...
...with many words, though, the original meaning has faded, and Webster's now defines depopulate only as "to reduce greatly the population of." Even that is probably too clear and specific. When Goodman uses the word not as something done to an area but as something done to the victims, then its only function is to be long and Latinate and abstract. That makes it suitable as a euphemism for a blunter word, like kill...