Word: manuals
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...public that you are "not to the manner born," only one response is dignified of a gentleman--"To hell with that shit."--assuming that you have made the proclamation with your fly fully zipped up. Or so J.P. Donleavy quips in his latest book, The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners...
...Unexpurgated Code carries this spoofing to near-fetish heights--for 289 pages, you're on the verge of uncontrollable laughter. Divided into six parts, this manual provides for all possible situations and exigencies of the social rat race: "Social Climbing," "Extinctions and Mortalities," "Vilenesses Various," "In Pursuit of Comfortable Habits," "Perils and Precautions," "Mischief and Memorabilia." The atmosphere is English manor house, gently decadent. Catalogued are innumerable pointers, all that the debonaire and naughty aristocrat must do to succeed is meticulously explained. There are rules and tips concerning accent improvement, farting in public, horsemanship, ass-kissing, being a big shot...
Carter said he would admit the manual because it did not refer to any specific operation. But he turned down Browning's efforts to enter another document on the grounds that it was much too specific. The disputed item was a rough diagram of the floor plan of a North Sacramento branch of the Bank of America. The single sheet of paper carried a handwritten note by Patty: "saw 7 employees: 5 women & 2 men (1 young & nervous. Manager is fat & Black...
...editors, a plague of fireflies has filled the sky: neologisms proliferate and the rules of grammar have raveled badly. To deal with the situation, the Associated Press and United Press International are preparing a new joint stylebook, and the New York Times has just issued a revised 231-page Manual of Style and Usage (Quadrangle; $10), though the last version appeared only 14 years ago. In the words of News Editor Lewis Jordan, who edited both revisions, the Times's stylebook gives "preference to that which safeguards the language from debasement." Whether it can safeguard Times language from dullness...
Though the stylebook aims at keeping language sacred, it does yield some ground in the area of the profane. Under "Obscenity, Vulgarity and Profanity," the manual explains that the Times will continue to present the news, as Times Patriarch Adolph S. Ochs decreed in 1896, "in language that is parliamentary in good society." But a mild profanity like Hell or damn, the manual says, "is really not offensive to a great degree" as long as it is not used as a matter of course...