Word: hayakawas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Francisco State College's famed Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa has no illusions. When ETC., the quarterly review of the International Society for General Semantics, devoted a special issue to LSD and other psychedelic drugs, Editor Hayakawa chose a few acid words for acid heads. Wrote he: "Most people haven't learned to use the senses they possess. I not only hear music, I listen to it. I find the colors of the day such vivid experiences that I sometimes pound my steering wheel with excitement. And I say, why disorient your beautiful senses with drugs and poisons before...
...Love Goddesses, put forth as a history of sex in the movies, is a grab bag of old film clips that suggests that the sundry excesses of Sweet Charlotte stem from time-honored Hollywood tradition. In The Cheat (1915), villainous Sessue Hayakawa leaves the mark of his desire on Fannie Ward's neck with a hot branding iron. In one of her early forays, Vamp Theda Bara anticipates the living bra by wearing what appears to be a giant tarantula. In Blonde Venus (1932), a gorilla lumbers through a chorus line, yanks off hirsute head and paws and clears...
Phrases such as "Peace in our time" and "Prosperity is just around the corner" invoke "word magic," as linguists call verbal formulas that promise to make dreams come true through sheer repetition. On the other hand, observes San Francisco State College's S. I. Hayakawa, a pioneering U.S. semanticist. "You don't move a mass society with a volume by Galbraith." Particularly in the U.S., as Cambridge Historian Denis Brogan has pointed out, "the evocative power of verbal symbols must not be despised, for these are and have been one of the chief means of uniting the United...
...they help crystallize great issues of the past for future generations: "Give me liberty or give me death"; "Lebensraum"; "The world must be made safe for democracy"; "There'll always be an England"; "unconditional surrender"; "the Great Leap Forward"; "We shall overcome." In an increasingly complex society, as Hayakawa points out, such coinages are essential "short cuts to a consensus...
Seven Is Tops. The word "slogan," from the Gaelic sluagh (army) and gairm (a call), originally meant a call to arms-and some of history's most stirring slogans, from "Erin go bragh" to "Remember Pearl Harbor" have been just that. In peacetime, argues Hayakawa, electorates respond more readily to slogans that promise change, since people are rarely satisfied with things as they are. One notable exception was the catch phrase that helped return Britain's Tory Party to power in 1959: "You never had it so good." In general, though, Democrats, like detergent manufacturers, favor slogans that...