Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...poetic books, chapter after chapter is hacked away. Gone is fully half of the book of Psalms, which might now be better retitled David's Greatest Hits. The prophets are especially victimized. Besides large chunks, telling phrases are lost. Consider the felicitous line from Jeremiah: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt." Snip out the last three words. Or this passage from Isaiah, immortalized in Handel's Messiah: "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities." Away with the second phrase, on grounds of redundancy. So much for poetry...
Under the dappling elms of Harvard, which likes to think that it sets the national tone in such matters, President Derek Bok traditionally welcomes each graduating class into "the Bok traditionally welcomes each graduating class into "the company of educated men and women." The phrase goes trippingly on the tongue, but what does it mean? Does any such community exist? Are the millions of people now engaged in earning diplomas really being educated...
Full Autonomy. Reagan in his letter to Begin defined this phrase as giving "Palestinian inhabitants real authority over themselves, the land and its resources." Israel argues that the phrase means giving Palestinians the right to govern themselves, but not authority over the land and resources of the West Bank and Gaza. The meaning of "autonomy" was deliberately left undefined in the accords. According to U.S. participants in the talks, Camp David envisioned a transfer of authority linked to resolution of Israel's security concerns. Says an Egyptian official: "Whenever we had a difference of opinion in the autonomy talks...
...climax of Tristan und Isolde, one bejeweled lady was so overcome by the intoxicating music that she pitched backward into the laps of the unflappable listeners behind her. Richard Wagner, who caused all the excitement, rested peacefully in his grave behind his villa Wahnfried, buried, in the phrase of one astonished British tourist, "in the backyard, sir, like a dog." Bayreuth has seen everything...
...late 1960s, and had become outmoded. Another suggested that it had become so inextricably linked over the years with longtime Editor Norman Cousins that when he stepped down in 1978, SR lost much of its essential identity. But perhaps the fatal factor was, in Weingarten's phrase, "the cost of getting and maintaining a subscriber...