Word: phrasing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Dirty Phrase." In the official press release, the White House stenographer changed "any S.O.B." to "anyone." That was the ineffectual gesture of the week. The original phrase, taken down by newsmen at the dinner, was already clacking over telegraph wires...
...radio commentators, fearful of the rule in the 1934 Communications Act against profanity, worked hard to keep their language more sedate than the President's. Newspapers, including the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") boldly printed the initials "S.O.B." in headlines. A phrase long taboo in newspapers had been given a kind of sanction by passing through the President's mouth; S.O.B. had become editorial S.O.P...
...least to Shakespeare (in King Lear). Owen Wister sounded it more discreetly in The Virginian (1902), where it was cloaked as "son-of-a -." The Virginian's ringing retort was well remembered: "When you call me that, smile." The only question was: Was it quite the proper phrase for the President to use in public, with or without smiling...
Secretary Acheson met with the Foreign Relations Committee in secret session, spent three hours going over the working draft of the pact. The only suggested changes, said one Senator, were a "phrase here and a word there." At week's end, Acheson called in the ambassadors of the North Atlantic countries, told them that they would have a pact with teeth in it after all, and with the full knowledge and consent of the Foreign Relations Committee. And in Norway, the ruling Labor Party gave unmistakable evidence that it thoroughly understood the alarums and excursions of parliamentary government...
Between numbers, in a Los Angeles cafe called Omar's Dome, a Negro pianist mused over his keyboard. A phrase had strayed into his mind, and he was trying to fit a melody to it. Suddenly, "it came to me just as straight as could be." Pianist Harvey O. Brooks hummed his tune all the way home, wrote it out in 20 minutes. Then he put it away in a drawer...