Word: grammars
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...monologue without intermission is sleep-inducing. Besides, Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) drops names and scandals in such an incoherent jumble that only someone minutely familiar with his career can grasp what is going on. Mixing facts and falsehood, he'll jump from the topic of Watergate to his first grammar school debate (he argued that girls were no good and won). What's more, he constantly interrupts his stream of jibberish, by raising his arms and launching into political rhetoric, by strewing papers around the room and slipping on them, or by going into prayer...
They are also probably the nation's most visible social failure. The homeless are everywhere. Theirs, however, is an ad hoc, nook-and-cranny geography. Hunkered down near a fence between a San Francisco freeway overpass and a grammar school. Asleep in the back room of an unguarded Chicago mortuary. Squatting near by in the dark eighth floor of an abandoned rooming house. Scrunched, and occasionally killed, inside Anchorage garbage dumpsters...
...indeed measure a lot of intangibles, such as how much grammar and vocabulary a student gets in high school English or even what kind of conversations his family holds around the dinner table. But the Achievement Tests measure much more directly a quality the student has even less control over: the quality of the high school curriculum. A student at a mediocre high school may have little chance of scoring well on the verbal SAT, but is he really any more likely to ace the Chem Achievement? Ironically, the fact that Achievements predict freshman grade point averages better than SATs...
...have not outgrown all our old animal instincts yet, heaven grant we never shall! The moment that, as a nation, we lose brute force, or an admiration for brute force, from that moment poetry and art are forever dead among us, and we will have nothing but grammar and mathematics left. The only way poetry can ever reach one is through one's brute instincts. 'Charge of the Light Brigade,' or 'How they brought good news to Aix,' move us in exactly the same way that one of Mr. Shue's runs...
White-gloved guards goose-stepped up to the monument commemorating their nation's most venerated martyr. Then Junta Coordinator Daniel Ortega Saavedra and Interior Minister Tomás Borge Martínez laid a single wreath on the tomb of Revolutionary Hero Carlos Fonseca Amador. Two dozen grammar school students, clad in denim shifts or designer jeans, shook their fists and cried, "The Yanquis will die!" before breaking into bashful giggles as adults smiled their approval. Finally, a high school marching band tramped loudly up to the monument, throwing a gaggle of preschoolers into disarray. As some toddlers cringed...