Word: noun
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lang's latest campaign of "action"--the noun he prefers--involves educating his readers on cost accounting requirements for government research grants. He opposes the Office of Management and Budget's guidelines for documenting research, as well as the process by which the government occasionally audits these standards, because of "the noxious, deleterious effect it has on the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the research of universities...
Take for example, one of our government's favorite nouns, the word "this." Never meant to be a noun and defined as an indefinite pronoun at best, the word "this" is used by the Administration to avoid naming anything they'd rather not discuss. Reading the morning paper on the day after any press conference, one is sure to find the President commenting, "I have nothing to say on this," or (when he is disposed to talk) "Let me say this on that," if he is referring to something like Grenada, Lebanon, Nicaragua, or the Russians walking out of negotiations...
...Even the more recent arrivals on his palette, like the soft greens and grayed browns of "Irish" paintings like Riverrun, 1972, an homage to Joyce's meditations on Dublin's river, the Liffey, soon acquire this fixed quality. Color in Motherwell is not an adjective, but a noun...
...although the adjective papal casts an aura over any noun it touches, and is one of the favorite words of cultural coercion in the Midcult lexicon (like masterpiece and treasure), one should use it with reserve. The papacy may be infallible in dogma, but not in taste. And although the exhibition claims to show us in detail just what the changing relations of the Popes to art were, it does not deliver the goods. It contains only routine information and no fresh ideas about the liturgical, propagandist, doctrinal and decorative purposes of Vatican collecting, or the effect of that collecting...
...output have long since entered the wider language. So have software and hardware. The human brain in some circles is now referred to as wetware. When a computer goes down, of course, it crashes. Menu, meaning a computer's directory of functions, is turning up now as noun and verb, as in "Let me menu my schedule and I'll get back to you about lunch...