Word: publicizer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that Americans have overmoralized public office. They tend to equate public greatness with private goodness, forgetting that a revered President like Abraham Lincoln suffered assorted psychosomatic ailments, that he was absentminded, and told jokes that made him seem callous. If private rectitude were tantamount to public usefulness, then Calvin Coolidge would be esteemed the greatest President...
Life, said John Kennedy, is unfair-and he might have added that it is especially unfair to politicians. Although they, in fact, have asked for it by seeking the glory and the burden of public service, they do have the right, simply as human beings, to privacy, relaxation and escape from responsibility. Politicians are bound to have their share of sins and foibles. Their problem, however, is not the foibles themselves but how to deal with them when they become public. The significance of the Chappaquiddick incident for Ted Kennedy is not whether he drank too much or planned...
...There were other supposed nobodies. When checking on, say, "a floater d.o.a. at County" (a drowning victim pronounced dead on arrival at Cook County Hospital), the first question was, "Black or white?" If the dead man happened to be Negro, the reporter would "cheap it out." As for impersonating public officials, it was accepted practice. More than one reporter telephoned the scene of a crime and barked, "Hello, this is Coroner Toman," only to be told, "That's funny, so is this...
Money's Worth. Vidal claimed that he had deliberately enticed Buckley into the TV eruption as a public service. "Looking and sounding not unlike Hitler, but without the charm," Vidal wrote, "he began to shriek insults in order to head me off, and succeeded, for by then my mission was accomplished: Buckley had revealed himself. I had enticed the cuckoo to sing its song, and the melody lingers...
Bastard Twins. Asked about the use of host as a transitive verb, as when Johnny Carson "hosts" the Tonight Show, Princeton Historian Eric F. Goldman wrote: "This is TVese and public-relationese, hardly an improvement over the English language." On the use of like as a conjunction, like in the Winston cigarette syndrome, Writer John Kiernan commented: "Such things as these persuade me that the death penalty should be retained." Isaac Asimov, the lucid science writer, also denounced finalize as "nothing more than bureaucratic illiteracy-the last resort of the communicatively untalented...