Word: impressment
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...when mother Butler urged him to have "his loins girt about with the breastplate of purity," she made herself ridiculous in his eyes. But the canon was much too tough to be soluble in comedy. Young Sam would have liked nothing better than to win him over and impress him, but he always failed. Sam disappointed his father by refusing to become a clergyman; the canon infuriated Sam by pestering him mercilessly about his future intentions. As Sam had no idea what these should be, his numerous suggestions only made the canon more cantankerous. Cotton-farming in Liberia, bookselling, homeopathic...
...Bush and his collaborators have various plans for getting around this difficulty. Perhaps, they think, the electrons from the sensitive metal could be "stored" on a surface that gives off no gases. Later they could be released, either to impress a strong image on a photographic plate, or to be scanned and displayed on a screen after the manner of television. The scanning system would not only yield a much stronger image with the same amount of light, it might even eliminate the fogging due to sky shine...
These pacts impress more by their number than their size. The fact is that the vast Communist bloc, with one-third of the world's population, decreased its proportion of world imports from 1.81% in 1952 to 1.66% in 1953. Partly, this is because the Reds, seeking self-sufficiency. impose their own version of the U.S. Battle Act.* More important, the Communists are too poor to pay for what they want...
...worked, in all innocence, against language. The strongest, science and technology, did two damaging things: they poured quantities of awkward new words into the language and this in turn persuaded everybody that each new thing must have a name, preferably 'scientific.' These new words . . . were fashioned to impress, an air of profundity being imparted by the particularly scientific letters k, x and o = Kodak, Kleenex, Sapolio. The new technological words were sinful hybrids like 'electrocute,' or misunderstood phrases like 'personal equation,' 'nth degree,' or 'psychological moment'-brain addlers...
...insisted that ... it had a right to be in on all press conferences . . . But . . . televising the press conference just about destroyed [it]. The official being questioned realized that he was talking not to news specialists but to an audience of millions, all voters. He shaped his answers to impress the millions, not to provide reporters with information...