Word: plain
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thanks to a succession of oversights by the Founding Fathers and early Congresses, the residents of the District of Columbia have never enjoyed one particular constitutional right cherished by all other Americans: the privilege of voting. There was no reasoning attending the oversights; it was just plain neglect.† Last week Rhode Island cast the 36th affirmative vote for the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution, giving 746,000 Washingtonians the right to vote in presidential elections - and three electoral votes. Ohio and Kansas are expected to ratify the amendment this week, making the necessary two-thirds majority for official adoption...
Macmillan's plain talk must have startled South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who arrived home from London prepared to boast about, not apologize for, leaving the Commonwealth. Verwoerd found many of his countrymen confused and uneasy. The morning of Verwoerd's return, police made predawn raids on the homes of eight African leaders, hauling them from bed to jail; in Johannesburg white hoodlums began beating up Africans in front of the city hall...
...papers capitalize Pope, but the Miami Herald does not. In most papers, rape is rape, but in the Memphis Commercial Appeal it is usually criminal attack. The Minneapolis Star and Tribune permit partial decommissioning of generals ("If it's Lt. Gen. John A. Jones in the first reference, plain Jones will suffice in later references"), but in the New York Times, once a general always a general. And no paper cares to folo the trail blazed by the Chicago Tribune into a virgin land of simplified spelling: altho, thru, sirup, burocracy...
...most difficult tasks a writer can undertake, to write the truth about himself and about his mother, Frank O'Connor has chosen to tell a plain tale that succeeds better as work of the imagination than most fiction. He writes out of that typical Irish condition, self-exile -O'Connor lives in Palo Alto, Calif.-but the pipes of nostalgia are muted. Indeed, his chosen adjective for the old sod is not "green" but "mediocre...
...Side. The first miracle involves his own nature. He lived in dreams, and as a man of 58 he still knows the boyhood truth that all children are slightly daft and that imaginative children are plain off their rocker. In the midst of this Cork slum, screaming with malice, he lived among "Invisible Presences"-imaginary young aristocrats at British public schools about whom he read in penny weeklies of the sort that excited the wrath of Etonian George Orwell. Through these stories, barefoot Mick was initiated into the code of the young English gentleman. Naturally it got him into...