Word: meaning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Governor Bowles talks about what should be done to construct an intelligent approach to world affairs, the words "dynamic" and "creative" are used with much frequency. Such words tend to be bandied about with too much ease today, so much so that they have lost almost all meaning. But Bowles is not proposing verbal solutions built on cliches. He is not playing the Madison Avenue word game, but engaging in an old American activity of saying what you mean...
...Alfred Kazin's review of Breakfast at Tiffany's in the Reporter: "I liked it. Except I didn't understand the last two lines. What does he mean by 'public vice or private tears'? I don't know what that means...
Since the new Prospect specifications mean less assurance that all who want to may join a club, the Bicker's governing body planned a meeting to re-define "100 per cent...
Historian-Educator Jacques Barzun can be a mean critter when aroused, as he has been of late by contemporary prose (a "mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax"). Higher Learning (he could find only "an immense amount of Lower Learning" in the U.S.), and the Ph.D. racket (TIME, Nov. 25, 1957). In American Scholar Barzun castigates his latest victim: detective stories, which, he says, have fallen on evil days, turning increasingly into "novels of haze and daze...
...tuition should rise by 100 per cent immediately. I have never made such a statement. In fact, all my proposals are related to a program for the next ten or twelve years. What is more, my proposal relates to the general situation in the United States and does not mean that every college need double its tuition. Some will have to go up more and some less...