Word: phrased
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When he inexplicably found it again after about a year, two Long Island real estate men found him and began to manage and market the Irish puncher as, in the way real estate men would naturally put it, "a hot property." The phrase is more like Dennis Rappaport, 36, the gaudier member of the firm, than Mike Jones, 46. Both men seem curiously proud of the nickname, "The Whacko Twins," earned in a number of ways. When their first fighter, black Middleweight Ronnie Harris, converted to Judaism, they sued to allow him to wear his yarmulka in the ring. They...
...clubs carried on, but as D.U. member Peter S. Prescott '57 insists. "It was impossible to underestimate their importance;" they were rapidly giving way to mere Pierian organizations-The Crimson, for one, which underwent in great boom in the 1950's. This period saw the birth of "diversity," a phrase that replaced "exclusively" on the tongues of Harvard men. True, the diversity went only so far (leaf through a 1950s vintage Yearbook some time; a Black face appears every fifth or sixth page). Still, by 1961 diplomas carried situations in the vernacular and not the Latin. A sense of excellence...
...1960s abstraction was all, and figure painting was out of style; the code phrase for this was "historically impossible," as though history itself-rather than a group of curators, critics and dealers-were engaged in majestically dictating what should be seen. In the 1980s, bored half to death by the austerities of minimalism, a now much larger (though not necessarily smarter or wiser) group of art consumers wants recognizable images and fictions of involvement; so we are inundated by painting that makes reference to the human figure. This is "historically inevitable." Impossible, inevitable: it only goes to show what...
...Louie!?" Murray snorted. "That malevolent little fireplug? That broken toilet of a man? That Rumpelstiltskin sadist to whom everything human was alien? Who was happy only when he could make everyone else miserable-which was most of the time? Who gave new meaning to the phrase old meany...
...sweet-talking. Political blather leans sharply to words (peace, prosperity) whose moving powers outweigh exact meanings. Merchandising depends on adjectives (new, improved) that must be continually recharged with notions that entice people to buy. In casual conversation, emotional stuffing is lent to words by inflection and gesture: the innocent phrase, "Thanks a lot," is frequently a vehicle for heaping servings of irritation. Traffic in opinion-heavy language is universal simply because most people, as C.S. Lewis puts it, are "more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them...