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Remember "Don't give up the ship"? Or, "You may fire when ready, Gridley"? What about "Damn the torpedoes-full speed ahead"? Now Commander James Cannon, skipper of the U.S. destroyer Mullinnix, has added his own ringing battle cry to the Navy's lexicon of heroic challenges. As Mullinnix arrived for a third tour off Viet Nam, Commander Cannon announced: "We are ready to step in the batter's box and belt a few pitches with hard stuff now that the contract is signed for our third season with the big leagues." Anyone looking for the roots...
Safire published a second edition so quickly because of the bounteous contributions of President Nixon and that empyreal employer of epigram, Spiro Agnew. Since the language of politics is essentially the lexicon of propaganda, the tone of the Nixonisms reflects what are perceived to be the shifting moods and needs of the nation. Thus, Safire observes, the Great Unwashed is undesirable, while the Silent Majority is praiseworthy. Nixon's critics, says Safire, have manufactured their own verbal ammunition, such as Nixonomics and Southern Strategy...
...champion cliché word in the contemporary lexicon is paranoia. Like most clichés, it gained its currency from actual conditions. A tragic example is an incident that took place in a Chicago supermarket parking lot. David Munoz, 10, earned soda-pop and movie money by carrying grocery bags to customers' cars. As he was crossing the parking area carrying loaded bags, he passed an armored truck. Inside was a guard, Ronald Brannan, who was waiting for his partner to pick up the supermarket receipts...
Hence the myth of feminine sensibility. It is not so much an idea as a rendezvous for a flock of adjectives: sweet, refined, minor, sensitive, nuanced, emotional, lyrical, pastel, and so on. The opposite list would be the favorite lexicon of praise for most New York painting since 1950, the attributes of the macho masterpiece: harsh, brusque, major, obsessive, direct, intellectual, tragic, primary. The result of the stereotype is an ingrained reluctance to take women artists as seriously...
This week, in recognition of the pertinence of such antipollution tactics, the Eco-Commandos are being declared first-prize winners of a national "ecotage" contest. The word is not yet in any lexicon. Coined by Environmental Action, the activist organization in Washington, D.C., that sponsored the contest, it was most emphatically defined in a warning from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as "sabotage done in the name of ecology...