Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bush criticizes Democratic plans as "socialized medicine." Although that phrase does sound vaguely pernicious, the only way to contain costs is for the government either to set spending limits or dictate the terms under which private plans would compete...
...Robert McNamara coined the phrase "assured destruction" to describe how the U.S. and the Soviet Union aimed atomic weapons at each other to deter a nuclear war. When wags prefixed the word mutual to McNamara's expression, the cold war era was acronymically defined...
What Herod saw was America in the late 1980s and early '90s, right down to that dire phrase "New Age." A society obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics, skeptical of authority and prey to superstition, its political language corroded by fake pity and euphemism. A nation like late Rome in its long imperial reach, in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified Emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives. A culture that...
Clean spun his "Death Fugue" around the images of "black milk of morning" and the "ashen-haired Shumlamith" of Goethe's Faust, weaving the drinking in of the dead burned in the Nazi ovens with a force competing for the soul of Germany. Derrida talks of wanting the only phrase worth publishing, "an 'up to date' phrase" (recalling the dates of "Shibboleth"). He wants a phrase that "would tell of the all-burning, otherwise called holocaust, and the crematory oven, in German in all the Jewish languages of the world...
Politicians and diplomats have already coined a phrase, "the crisis of peace," for the postwar dilemma. Aside from the obstacles posed by unrepentant zealots on both sides in the protracted political struggle, there is a legitimate question about whether the country will function any better united than it does when bloodily riven. Poverty, social inequality, overreliance on U.S. financial handouts, simmering disputes over land and ideology, and a choking residue of hatred from the war all conspire against success in rebuilding the shattered land. Says National Assembly Vice President Ruben Zamora, who is close to the insurgents: "Peace generates huge...