Word: meant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Three days later it backslid, ran the headline: HEARINGS STRESS ACHESON UBIQUITY. Professor White, 33, spotted "ubiquity" as one of the thickest fog words, made a bet with John Crider, the Herald's chief editorial writer, that few readers knew what it meant. To prove it, White stood in front of the Boston Public Library and polled 72 passersby. His findings: only 19.4% correctly thought that "ubiquity" meant "everywhere-at-the-same-time"; most thought (by association with the name "Acheson") that it referred to "errors...
Confusion. White began making his collection of fog words last spring, by picking 25 sentences from New York and Boston newspapers. Sample sentence: "He has marshaled his oft-reiterated and unproved allegations to obfuscate and postpone decisions." White asked some 200 students and parents whether obfuscate meant reverse, change, confuse or rearrange. Only 23 knew it meant confuse Results were similar for such standbys as plebiscite, inculcate, anomaly, shibboleth, indigenous, cataclysms, aggrandizement tantamount, statutory, encroachment, implementation and peripheral...
...policy, act of overt aggression, fusillade of shots, dereliction of duty, titular head of the party, diplomat without portfolio, deficit spending, eschewing presidential ambitions, policy of containment. The average reader got nearly half the phrases wrong. Even "bipartisan foreign policy" had hard going; some of those questioned thought it meant that both Roman Catholics and Protestants should be employed in the State Department...
Jose himself points out that his career in show business began long before Hollywood-in Valencia, at the age of seven. A child prodigy, he got the job of beating out tunes in the local nickelodeon to help support his family. "From the beginning, music meant money to me-it was very serious...
...posse of cattlemen whooped into Washington last week to take justice into their own hands. They aimed to hang price controls on a sour apple tree. If that meant higher meat prices, they had a quick answer. Meat Packer Chris Finkbeiner of Little Rock, Ark. advised housewives: "If the money runs low, then just eat lower...