Word: phrased
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gentlemen, I'm sorry to say it, but I'm not the bearer of good tidings," St. Clair began. Then he explained the nature of the new evidence, which was soon to be described as more than the long-sought "smoking pistol" and actually, in the apt phrase of Columnist George F. Will, akin to a "smoking howitzer." St. Clair said flatly that he had been ready to resign if Nixon had opposed release of the material. "I have my professional reputation to think about," he explained, adding that any other action would have been to withhold evidence...
...variety of magazines can take a lot of liberties that people who write books can't. They don't have to worry too much about consistency, and they can get lazy in their writing without attracting too much notice. If a magazine writer falls upon a particular turn of phrase that pleases his ear or an observation that he considers particularly telling, he can use it over and over in different pieces for different magazines without anyone really noticing. When the pieces are collected in book form, however, all of the writer's laziness and over-facile devices come...
Hemphill owes a great deal to writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese in the devices he uses to make his articles work. He usually starts and ends each with a carefully constructed scene or conversations instead of the kind of throwaway catch-phrase that prevails in feature journalism, and he tries to catch the minutiae and inflections of speech that best reveal his subjects. At times, his debt to Wolfe becomes embarrassingly apparent in its magnitude, especially in his stock-car pieces, which always echo Wolfe's classic "The Last American Hero." The Wolfe style does have its limits...
WIGGINS: Just what is abusive conduct? What does it mean? I suggest that that is an empty phrase, having meaning in terms of what we pour into it... We have no right to impose our notions of morality and propriety upon others and make it their legal duty to comply therewith...
...more intensely. For those too young to remember 1950-1960, the time is suffused with a distant romance-as all things are when they exist beyond memory. Those who came of age in the '50s know better. To them the '50s were the embodiment of Dickens' phrase: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief ... it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope...