Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...CONDUCT UNBECOMING a Harvard student"--the official phrase for undesirable action usually refers to excessive violations of law or courtesy, such as severely hurting someone or something. But University officials are quietly including another category in the list of traits they'd rather not see undergraduates display--irreverence and independent expression...
Editor's Note: Errol T. Louis's article When the Tough Get Going (10/4/83) quotes the phrase "kick ass" not from James Q. Wilson's writings but from the lecture delivered by Wilson and George L. Kelling to the Command Staff of the New York City Police Department...
...Louis's assertion notwithstanding, I did not sum up my advice in one phrase ("kick ass") nor did the audience remain "stonily silent." In fact, the session was characterized by animated discussion and strong disagreement among some members of the police audience, the panel on which I served, members of the general audience, and myself. It is likely that many of us who were there did not then agree on the focus of the debate. It is even less likely that we would reach such a consensus...
...colors of Elegies are, as he put it, "an equivalence of the ferocity of the whole encounter." This is perhaps what Mallarme refers to in his famous phrase about describing not the object itself but the effect it produces. To speak of "Motherwell black" or "Motherwell blue" is not to identify a particular hue-there are many blacks in his work and a near infinite range of blues, from creamy cerulean to wine-dark-but rather to evoke the way these colors work, as stable characters in a plot of sensation...
There is also no confusion of crime and error. True contrition does not permit the phrase "Stalin's errors." Such a formulation implies that a tendency to mass murder constitutes not a moral but an intellectual failing. Hence the companion formulation that attributes crimes to choosing an "incorrect line," the moral equivalent of taking a wrong turn on a highway...