Word: phrased
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...Where the City Came From Your skimmer item on Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates [Oct. 20] states that the phrase "city on a hill" was coined by John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. Not so. Winthrop was quoting Jesus' Sermon on the Mount: "[The righteous] are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden" (Matthew 5:14). Nathaniel Jewell, Adelaide, South Australia...
...with no particular agenda, just a feeling in the post-Watergate era that Hawaii's government needed to be more accountable to its people. Nevertheless, it resulted in 34 separate amendments - more than 1,000 individual changes to Hawaii's state constitution - that included the addition of the untranslated phrase, "Ua mau ke ea o ka 'aina i ka pono" in the constitution's preamble - "The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness." It was a sweeping victory for Native Hawaiian rights and culture...
...cited a love for learning and a commitment to tikkun olam—a Hebrew phrase meaning “repairing of the world”—as shared values that helped bring them together...
...pages later came the now famous quote from economist Milton Friedman: "We are all Keynesians now." Friedman later objected that it was taken out of context--all he meant was that everybody used Keynesian language and concepts. But the phrase stuck. It's often attributed these days to Republican President Richard Nixon, but what Nixon actually said, in 1971, was the less expansive "I am now a Keynesian...
...with powerful imagery. He need only call up a few simple, well-placed nouns and his scene is clear. He takes this idea the furthest in a two-part poem that lists the things that divide man to show the consequences of these divisions. Each terse one-word phrase becomes packed with meaning, emphasizing the divided nature of the concepts they represent: “Grid / coordinates. Maps. Longitude. Latitude. Property lines drawn / in unconsecrated dust.” War is both a calculated affair deployed from a bunker and a personal conflict between two neighbors...