Word: merriam
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...Ethics are low in this town, says John Merriam, publisher of a newsletter about the Washington media. "There just ain't no political standards." Debate positions normally are taken from the previous public stands of the candidates. Says Ben Wattenberg, a political analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute: "Maybe the person who turned over the papers saved a Reagan research team an awful lot of trouble...
...COURSE, Oxford-Webster comparison seems inevitable, as both parties acknowledge--or regally refuse to acknowledge--in their introductory essays. In the Webster "Tabular History of the English Language," the "Developments since 1800" list cryptically notes, "Oxford, Century and Merriam-Webster in high-flying company. Oxford, on the other hand, goes on for several pages about the OED and James Murray's gallant 37-year struggle to publish the weighty tome, but does not even mention the Webster edition. War simmers among the lexicographers...
...decided early on that I would major, oops, concentrate, in Government, and I took the well-known courses--Government A, English A, Math A, History A and so on. Historian Frisky Merriam was walking across the stage of New Lecture Hall in 1926 and putting his feet up on the lectern, distracting his students. He was a character. Later on I had Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. in another history course. He told the story of some C-minus student who had to be told what femmes de guerre were. "Oh, I thought they were hors de combat," the fellow said...
...only for their propensity to convert their wealth into meretricious symbols like mansions and Rolls-Royces, but also for the ethos they exemplified. The Goulds and Astors represented a conspicuous clan of moneyed men who spouted the ideals of voluptuous womanhood, the omnipotent buck, and masculine supremacy. Eve Merriam's play, The Club, depicts one evening in the lives of four members of this carriage trade set, dramatizing through song their positions on various pertinent social issues...
Despite the actresses' fine performances, there is a facet of their characterizations that creates a nagging, if minor, disappointment. Bertie, Freddie, Algy and Bobby were intended by playwright Merriam to represent paradigms of upper class hauteur--to be gleefully chauvinistic, without the vaguest hint of guilt at their authoritative misjudgments of women. In a larger sense, the quartet was to exemplify all such men of affluence. But this is precisely where the show stumble, for Benfer, Mc Millan, Task and Val-Schmidt all work too hard at aping this stereotype. Striving to be warbling Everymen, they fail to make their...