Word: prosaic
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...flip side of the impossibly perfect Huxtables. Yet the two shows have some key similarities: both were inspired by the monologues of a stand-up comic, and both depend on loosely structured, slice-of-life episodes rather than sitcom contrivances. A typical Roseanne segment might revolve around something as prosaic as a visit to a restaurant or a discussion of how to pay the bills. (Roseanne's strategy: "You pay the ones marked final notice, and you throw the rest away.") Best of all, behind the put-downs and childish taunting lies a genuinely affectionate and affecting (if sometimes cutesy...
...position. John Kennedy early in his presidency grew heated and called Big Steel men "s.o.b.'s," then quickly cooled down and made amends. "If they don't do well, I don't do well," he explained. Even Lyndon Johnson, renowned for his arm twisting, had a more prosaic explanation for most of the successes so often credited to his legendary rage and threats. "Remember the prophet Isaiah: Come let us reason together," Johnson used to say. "Telling a man to go to hell and making him go there are two different things...
Bush, a former CIA director, supports Reagan's policy of using covert action and military aid to assist anti-Communist rebels. But while Reagan ennobled -- and romanticized -- the policy by calling its recipients "freedom fighters," his more prosaic Vice President talks about the problems of waging "low-intensity conflict." Bush wants to continue funding the Nicaraguan contras, but, says Kim Holmes of the conservative Heritage Foundation, "I don't think he would ever have called them the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers." If Reagan's beau ideal of the swashbuckling American good guy is Oliver North, Bush seems...
...last Tuesday night mattered not at all. Chants of "Duke! Duke! Duke!" alternated with cries of "Let's go, Mike!" And when Michael Dukakis paused before speaking, his usually constricted smile was as broad and welcoming as New York harbor. Campaign workers cheered ecstatically at the Duke's every prosaic line. "I love New York!" brought hurrahs. "Friends, if we can make it here, we can make it anywhere." Delirious applause...
Speakes is surely not the first White House spokesman to fake a President's words, though he may be the first one to admit it. Washington is a city with a large industry devoted to making inarticulate politicians sound lucid, to turning what is prosaic into poetry. But, as Speakes ruefully admits now, even manufactured words ought to be placed in the proper mouth before they are passed out to history...