Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Appearing before the audience of New York policemen (one of whom brought his son to hear the lecture). Kelling summed up the advice he and Wilson had for policemen in one phrase: kick ass. So much for inculcating "a clear sense of the outer limit" of police authority...
This didn't go over too well with the audience of captains, inspectors, and chiefs. They remained stonily silent as Kelling explained that he and Wilson had deliberately chosen a provocative phrase to stimulate discussion. I remember wondering if this was why people study for years, get PhD's and become instructors at Harvard--so they can tell cops to have their patrolmen go "kick...
...home, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, the country went on "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." People laughed a lot but without bitterness. Underneath I its frivolity the country remained devout about the American verities. The American system was hardly questioned, and the phrase "God's country" could still be used unblushingly...
...Right Stuff: that was the name we had been groping for. The phrase summarized the primitive and profound quality sensed beneath the space program's propaganda and the sometimes sleazy manipulations. It was, of course, Tom Wolfe who carefully defined a vague vernacular term and blazoned it as the title of his gloriously intelligent, funny and, above all, romantic bestseller "about the psychology of flying and the status competition among pilots." One suspects Wolfe's phrase is now poised for an even deeper and broader penetration into the common consciousness. For The Right Stuff, which many people thought...
Viet Nam was a televised war, a "livingroom war," in the phrase of Critic Michael Arlen. The camera still conveys, more immediately than almost anything in print, the imagery and texture of war: whirring helicopters, cascades of bombs from the bellies of B-52s, the devastation wrought by battle. As used in the series, the camera is also a neutral observer: it provides a forum to participants ranging from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong and from Americans who considered the war honorable to those who believed it immoral. Conclusions about right and wrong...