Word: newmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...society by Watergate, recent publications in this country have produced something of an American counterpart to Orwell's essay. Like Orwell's response to World War II, these essays--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s"Politics and the American Language,"Henry Fairlie's "Arise, Ye Prisoners of Jargon," and Edwin Newman's Strictly Speaking--are responses to the effects of political events on English as written and spoken in this country. But also, like Orwell, these writers realize that changes in the condition of language are due to much more basic causes than political changes, that in the end language is rooted...
READING Strictly Speaking is like getting back a thoroughly researched term paper from a grader who has made extensive, witty comments about your grammatical errors while ignoring your more substantive points. Edwin Newman, a veteran of the NBC news staff, certainly has a wonderful sense of the use--I should say misuse--of language. No one--politician, journalist, president, businessman, baseball coach, restaurateur, taxi driver--emerges unscathed from a seemingly endless catalogue of embarrassing, boorish, pretentious, dangerous and innocuous lapses and errors Newman records from his over 20 years experience in reporting. There is the actress who told...
From the verbal standpoint, Newman writer, Watergate was a lengthly catalogue of the type of flaccid phrase so common in society today: "One of the things the Watergate hearings revealed was a poverty of expression, an inability to say anything in a striking way, an addiction to a language that was almost denatured, and in which what little humor did occur was usually unintentional...
...Watergate is just the tip of the iceberg of America's language, according to Newman. In addition to all of its other implications, Watergate also "revealed the sad state of language,"from the president on down, through Ehrlichman and Haldeman,through Ron Ziegler, through the press with its acceptance of euphemistic explanations from government officials, through the political candidates with their sterile, ingratiating speeches, through the social scientists with their unwieldy terminology,through the ad men with their ready, mindless sales pitches, right down to the proffessional athletes with their trugid comments, to the small restaurants using foreign names...
...when prosecutor Newman A. Flanagan was finished with his witnesses, defense attorney William P. Homans Jr. '41 lit into them with some success...