Word: meaninglessness
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...last the long-awaitied winners in the Dr. Pressclips Meaningless Journalism Contest for December. First place goes to the Boston Herald for itspicture of a teenager grinning into the camera with a snow shovel in his hand. The cutline reads, "Twelve year old (Name withheld) shows no sign of birth defects as he shovels snow outside his parents home in Mattapan." Attaboy, kid. Second place to the New York Post for its "Sam Sleeps" cover, complete with a photograph of David Berkowitz catching a few z's in the Tombs. Honorable mentions toonumerous to name... --Joseph W. Dalton...
...past four winters, Tom Sanders served as Harvard's basketball coach. In that capacity, he led the Crimson to 40 victories against 60 defeats, a feat so meaningless that last June, Sanders was appointed assistant coach of the Boston Celtics...
...palindrome: the optimists can read its messages forward, the pessimists backward. In 1977 American English gave both groups plenty of opportunity. The air was saturated with recent coinages ("reverse discrimination," "mainstreaming," "ten-four, good buddy"). Some phrases enriched the nation's tongue; many impoverished it with jargon and meaningless terms. For words are like prescription lenses; they obscure what they do not make clear. This year the Washington Star had no trouble finding examples that blurred. In a section labeled "Gobbledygook," the newspaper offered a daily $10 prize for the worst phrase of the day. Sample from...
Velsicol Chairman Paul F. Hoffman called last week's indictments an "outrage." Said he: "We do not understand how the Government can complain about the delay in submitting two scientifically insignificant, incomplete readings when the authors of those readings have subsequently stated they were meaningless." Dr. Rust, one of the authors, told TIME last week that he found tumors and severe liver damage in the mice tested but no satisfactory proof that the pesticides were a cause of cancer. Still, he believes that his findings were alarming and should have been brought to the attention...
...family, with its own kind of love and its own kind of respect, a family that's shed its blood for one of the few magazines around that still has a purpose beyond the bucks. And as the world outside grows meaner and more meaningless, who wants to run away from home...