Word: opprobrium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last year James Spader made his first large claim on public approval with his portrayal of a delicately nuanced weirdo in sex, lies, and videotape. Around the same time, sometime brat-packer Rob Lowe made his first large claim on public opprobrium when it was revealed that he had staged a somewhat less formal drama -- more of an improv, really -- involving sex, lies and videotape in an Atlanta hotel room during the 1988 Democratic Convention. Now the two young actors are co-starring in something called Bad Influence, and guess what familiar items feature in its plot...
...then, did Ortega venture so much opprobrium abroad to score points at home in a race that, by most accounts, he was already winning? The answer may lie in a poll published two weeks ago by the Nicaraguan Institute of Public Opinion. With nearly 90% of Nicaragua's 1.97 million voters registered, large numbers of them as the result of a Sandinista campaign, Ortega led the opposition by 26% to 21%. Yet the Institute's sample showed that 46% remained undecided -- more than enough to make any candidate for office extremely uneasy...
...false ideal of tolerance has not only outlawed censorship but discouraged censoriousness (another word for censure). Most civilizations have expressed their moral values by mobilization of social opprobrium. That, rather than specific legislation, is what changed the treatment of minorities in films and TV over recent years. One can now draw opprobrious attention by gay bashing, as the Beastie Boys rock group found when their distributor told them to cut out remarks about "fags" for business reasons. Or by anti-Semitism, as the just disbanded rap group Public Enemy has discovered...
...that they could not buy lettuce or grapes during a Chavez boycott. Perhaps there was even a buyer perverse enough to miss driving the unsafe cars Nader helped pressure off the market. On the other hand, we do not get sports analysis made by racists. These mobilizations of social opprobrium are not examples of repression but of freedom of expression by committed people who censured without censoring, who expressed the kinds of belief the First Amendment guarantees. I do not, as a result, get whatever I approve of subsidized, either by Pepsi or the government. But neither does...
Tolerance opposes censorship to make for freedom of expression. Censure, the free expression of disapproval, mobilizes social opprobrium...