Word: oracular
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Glossier and more ambitious than most of its fellow picnickers in the meadow of political life, a new "Journal of Divergent Views on National Issues" begins to sit imposingly on the newsstands. Its editors, Yale Juniors, are more than hopeful about its job; indeed, they sound oracular; they will "cover from all points of view the major problematic situations countervailing our way of life". To start with, they cover the United Nations...
...next half-hour, the show proceeded as predictably as if Kennedy and the assembled newsmen were following a script-as they might well have been. The President had a few announcements to make. Then came the questions, ranging from the oracular to the silly. "Mr. President," began Tom Wicker of the New York Times, "this is the first anniversary of your election last year, and in the campaign that preceded that election there was considerable talk." etc. Eighty-five words later, Wicker got to his point: If Kennedy were campaigning all over again, would he do it differently? (Answer...
Characteristically, the style is staccato, bone-bare, oracular and dull. The format is uninviting; usually four letterhead-size pages printed to look as if they had come fresh from a typewriter. The contents often suggest the confidential whisper of a race-track tout. The cost can be incredibly high: as much as $125 a year for some 3,000 words a week-an annual total well below the word count in one average issue of the New York Times (185,000). Yet so insatiable is the public appetite for inside dope that in the few decades since its birth...
...class emancipate themselves from it as quickly as possible." Ultimately, "the things our novelists know about are the grades and subtleties and shifts of society . . . with a special emphasis on childhood which leads them towards fantasies of guilt and innocence." What the British novel needs to day, says the oracular Times, is "not less art, but more life...
...broadcasting booth, head cocked into a single earphone, Murrow gave the impression that he was listening more to the rulings of the Supreme Chairman than to the conversation of his fluent, competent colleague, Walter Cronkite. Murrow is still television's big news name; but his doom-edged, oracular school of reporting-better suited to war and disaster than to the gaudier side of U.S. politics-was rendered obsolete by the fresh wind from...