Word: monstrously
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Semantic aphasia is the monstrous insensitivity that allows generals to call war "pacification," union leaders to describe strikes or slowdowns as "job actions," and politicians to applaud even moderately progressive programs as "revolutions." Semantic aphasia is also the near-pathological blitheness that permits three different advertisers in the same women's magazine to call a wig and two dress lines "liberated...
...North Carolina Supreme Court in 1948, Judge Ervin rarely missed a chance to write expansive opinions. After a complex appeal contesting an ambiguous will, he blasted the lower-court judge for having "murdered the king's, queen's and everybody else's English by using the monstrous linguistic abomination and/or." Pondering conflicting testimony in a manslaughter case, Ervin suggested that truth often comes to the biased witness as "the image of a rod to the beholder through the water-bent and distorted." North Carolina lawyers still quote Ervin's opinions because, says one, "it gives...
...administrative system that might have been designed in a demented collaboration between Franz Kafka and Rube Goldberg. Federal, state and local regulations regularly overlap, producing a punch-card maze from which escape seems impossible. The situation is, as the President said in his State of the Union address, "a monstrous, consuming outrage...
...double doors of the drab green second-class railroad coach burst open as the train jerked to a halt. Onto the rain-drenched station platform tumbled 21 disheveled passengers. Men in ill-fitting clothes hurriedly handed down bulging cardboard suitcases. One man struggled with a monstrous feather mattress while a small boy darted away to admire the bicycles in a commuter's rack. There were few words, only a rush to get off the train. With good reason. For many of the passengers, the train was a reminder of a world they have been trying to leave since...
...President called again for passage of his Family Assistance Plan, designed to reform what he described accurately enough as the "monstrous, consuming outrage" that is the present welfare system. Nixon, aware that Democrats will propose broad health care legislation, told Congress he would present a new program under which "no American will be prevented from obtaining basic medical care by inability to pay," medical schools would be helped to graduate more doctors, health care would be available where it is needed, and cancer research would be speeded by a new $100,000,000 appropriation...