Word: phrased
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...just what I choose it to mean." He mitigated this tyrannical attitude by explaining that when he made a word do a lot of work, he always paid it extra. Spiro Agnew, who also has a highhanded way with words, owes a great deal of overtime pay to the phrase "radical liberal." As he employs the phrase, upon which he has turned his vigorous intervention in the current congressional campaign, radical liberal seems to be an elastic blanket covering a huge bed, strangely cohabited by "the northeastern Establishment," the more inflamed students and the militant blacks. The term radical liberal...
...characters or situations but on the comic possibilities of words themselves. Perelman is a master of a bewildering array of trite and overused literary styles, and has a vocabulary the size of Webster's Unabridged. Above all, he knows precisely when to use the obscure word, the foreign phrase, or the outlandish simile for maximum effect...
...Jesuit College at Clongowes. Perelman is able to resist this fabulous literary nugget, but he overhears a professor smugly telling his wife Chlorine that it was worth the hundred dollars he had paid for it: "It throws Joyce's youth into a wholly new perspective, crystallizing in a phrase, as it does, the denigration of his coevals...
Unfortunately I was not incisive enough to prevent Mr. Landau-and his mentor, Mr. Chomsky, whom he faithfully copies in this regard-from quoting this phrase so completely out of context so as to make it imply the exact opposite of what I said. The quoted phrase appears in an article entitled "The Bases of Accommodation" and the complete paragraph in which it appears is as follows...
...commanding as much as $50,000 a night. Like her idol Bessie Smith, Janis had a singing style as earthy as a streetwalker. There were myriad subtle ways in which her voice could range from a deep throaty groan to a high tender croon. When she licked into a phrase like "Oh, I'd be so good to ya, babe, yeah!" (Turtle Blues), there was no mistaking the kind of ecstasy she had in mind...