Word: lexicon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...torturer's lexicon also includes mordant, mocking names for their techniques and instruments. The Wet Submarine, for example, means near-suffocation of a prisoner by immersing him in water, or, frequently, urine; the Dry Submarine is the same thing, except that a plastic bag is tied over the victim's head to deprive him of oxygen. In the Grill, the victim is stretched out face up on a metal frame while a "massage" of shocks is delivered to various parts of the body. A Brazilian invention called the Parrot's Perch is used in many countries; it consists...
Unfounded Fears. In the West, and most notably the U.S., where President Ford has banned the word detente from his political year lexicon, the anniversary is being all but ignored. One reason is that some of NATO's initial hesitations have been justified: the gains of Communists in Southern Europe are partly attributable to the post-Helsinki mood, in which the threat of international Communism has appeared to be further diminished. Yet the West's main fear, that a Helsinki-inspired euphoria would lead to sharp cutbacks in defense spending by NATO nations, seems so far to have...
...vocabulary of some 750,000 words-the world's largest and richest-the language of Shakespeare and Spiro Agnew provides enough terms to offend almost everybody. Those most recently and publicly irked are the feminists. The mother tongue, as they have argued for some time, is a lexicon of male chauvinism. For years the language has evolved along the lines preferred by the male-controlled society that used...
...observe the proprieties and, except for Martha, they did. Being the wife of the Attorney General did not prohibit her, she believed, from expressing opinions of her own, even though they often resulted in embarrassing headlines. Anti-Viet Nam War demonstrators were "very liberal Communists" in Martha's lexicon. In a series of late-night phone calls, she demanded that the Arkansas Gazette "crucify" then Senator J. William Fulbright for his opposition to a Nixon Supreme Court Nominee, G. Harrold Carswell...
...tourists, a husband and wife, enter the room. The proprietress announces that the admission is $2 each. Replies the man: "Two dollars! Shit!" Leave it to the man who brought opera to both Broadway (The Consul) and film (The Medium) to bless the operatic lexicon with one of the commoner four-letter words...