Word: lexicon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such nasty little games would not go on if we had any way of keeping our political lexicon up to date. Not merely the hybrids, but elemental political terms such as conservative, liberal, radical, progressive, are wildly misleading as descriptions of the actual positions, motivations and attitudes of most of the people to whom they refer...
...hyperbole, but it is disturbing to find the Vice President engaging in an essentially misleading confusion of political categories. Without question, some liberals have supported or at least been tolerant of some radical causes. But in rational political debate, words must be used precisely. Radicals, in today's lexicon, include bomb throwers and those committed to destroying American institutions. Liberals, often criticized by Agnew as being too soft, cannot by any stretch of definition be lumped in with violent extremists. Yet the Vice President does the trick with a flick of the hyphen...
There was rhetoric on the other side as well. At West Point, Vice President Agnew growled about unspecified "criminal misfits" and "charlatans of peace"-two fresh phrases in his lengthening lexicon of epithets*-before he exhorted the cadets to take up the challenge of a "lonely and difficult war." Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans had an equally appreciative audience when he told Merchant Marine Academy graduates that "the destroyers of today will not survive any more than the witch burners of Colonial New England or the book burners of Hitler's Germany." At the Air Force Academy, Defense Secretary Melvin...
There is a whole lexicon of rationalization for the working class' (a weak and hackneyed term, but a connotative one) seemingly illogical hatred of cultural/political radicals. "False consciousness," "Mass-media indoctrination," "Counter-revolutionary schooling"-I have used them all to glibly dismiss red-neckism. These polemies are particularly convenient because they can be used, in one form or another, to ignore just about any mass consensus that is adverse to radical programs...