Word: harmless
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Such verbal knee jerks might be dismissed as harmless. But they never were by Orwell. "The slovenliness of our language," he wrote in 1946, "makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." And it is a surpassing irony that the title Orwell made famous has become a symptom of the very sloppiness he deplored: what he called a "Meaningless Word," a ramshackle abstraction inviting everyone to come in and stop thinking for a while...
...take a crude example, what Communist would dare to admit in public that Trotsky is a better writer than Stalin-as he is, of course? To say "X is a gifted writer, but he is a political enemy and I shall do my best to silence him" is harmless enough. Even if you end by silencing him with a tommy-gun you are not really sinning against the intellect. The deadly sin is to say "X is a political enemy: therefore he is a bad writer...
...spectators might tear down the goalposts. But the problem is more complicated than that. Students in a state of drunken excitement probably would not be daunted by the increased force. In fact, the deployment of security personnel might add a violent dynamic to what in itself is a quite harmless way for frenzied students to let off steam...
Until he was arrested in Texas last June, Henry Lee Lucas looked harmless. "He just seemed like an ordinary person, real polite and real nice," recalls Faye Moore, wife of a Pentecostal preacher in Stoneburg, Texas. "I never knew him to take a drink, and he never used foul language." One humid May morning last year, Moore's husband Reuben, 52, gave Lucas and his companion Freida ("Becky") Powell, Toole's 15-year-old niece, a lift in Montague County, Texas. He offered the couple room and board in exchange for chores around his makeshift church. Thirteen months...
...appreciation and abuse. Occasionally (usually in our dreams) we walk past men who smile fondly at us. Most of the time we are subjected to a crossfire which makes running the gauntlet look like a stroll. Comments like "Mmmmmm, nice," and "Hi there, honey" from total strangers may seem harmless; but because of them a women who ventures out in public is apt to return home feeling more-totalled than Total...