Word: phrased
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...never have used the expression "to terminate with extreme prejudice" when it wanted a spy rubbed out. But in the context of a war in which "pacification of the enemy infrastructure" is the military mode of reference to blasting the Viet Cong out of a village, the phrase sounded so plausible that millions readily accepted it as accurate...
...been distorted and their ability to assess the significance of poverty has been reduced. Perhaps the most chilling example of euphemism's destructive power took place in Hitler's Germany. The wholesale corruption of the language under Nazism, notes Critic George Steiner, is symbolized by the phrase endgültige Lösung (final solution), which "came to signify the death of 6,000,000 human beings in gas ovens...
...description of anarchy, the university radicals have half seriously given the world "anticipatory Communism," which means to steal. The New Left, though, still has a long way to go before it can equal the euphemism-creating ability of Government officials. Who else but a Washington economist would invent the phrase "negative saver" to describe someone who spends more money than he makes...
...resounding literary quarterlies, the influential journalists, the great prophet-critics like Coleridge, Carlyle, Walter Bagehot and Arnold. Such cloud-capped, towering judges of culture and anarchy have dissolved in today's bland intellectual climate. But in their heyday, English men of letters could claim, in Gross's phrase, to have "written a collective biography of the national mind...
...right, say it is a poor start. Say further, if you will, that the twentieth century has become a horror. Agreed that the "Age of Longing," the age of the Cold War and all that phrase connotes is hardly an age worth living in, let alone preparing for by the hard study and effort...