Word: prudishness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that for once the younger generation is not in revolt against anything. We don't want to rebel against our elders. They are much too nice to be rebellable-agamst. Old revolutionaries as they are they get rather cross with us and tell us we are stuffy and prudish, but even this can't provoke us into hostility. Our fathers brought us up to see them not as the representatives of ancient authority and unalterable law, but as rebels against our grandfathers. So naturally we have grown up to be on their side, even if we feel...
...book, Paton's manner has far more tedious, the treatment of the subject matter far less convincing. Pieter van Vlaanderen, the policeman, faces the problems of a full-blooded man who suffers from a prudish wife, a puritanical society and his own rigidly conventional conscience. So, after a long moral struggle that is talked about a great deal but hardly described at all, he gives in to his lust and goes after the girl Stephanie. By the scheming of a subordinate on the police force, he is caught, tried, and sent to jail (under South Africa's Immorality...
...last election proves it; McCarthyism proves it; the constant battering of liberals proves it; the general distrust of intellectuals proves it; and the favorable reception to your article proves it. And what is this neo-Puritanism? It is an authoritarian morality that is completely intolerant of opposition; a prudishness in support of that morality; a passive and negative philosophy of life, purporting to leave all to a God that is no less prudish (the doctrine of original sin), no less authoritarian (a jealous God unmindful that he created men with free wills) . . . The remedy for "growing intellectual confusion" is neither...
...vulgar snafu derivatives may have been American in origin . . . but acceptance and widespread dissemination of their useful addition to Anglo-Saxon idiom was peculiarly British and essentially Eighth Armyish. Your correct if prudish definition of snafu as "situation normal, all fouled up" is a reminder that there were exclusively British ascending and descending degrees of snafu. There was the "self-adjusting snafu" and the "non-self-adjusting snafu." And there was the climactic "cummfu," which, roughly translated, meant "complete utter monumental military foul...