Word: rude
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...asserts that the propensity to confront authority and orthodoxy was one of the hallmarks of a great intellect. He writes: "I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions... I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways." Perhaps it is no surprise that Emerson was sometimes considered a heretic during his academic career at Harvard...
Using a telephone to increase the range in which one can be rude isn't new either. Think what the telephone has already done for the invasion of peace and privacy. For years it has tyrannized people's lives with the premise that its jangling summons requires them to drop whatever they are doing and attend to it immediately. And they do. Lovers leave sweethearts with their outstretched arms and business people leave customers with their outstretched wallets...
...heard the standard excuses for the rude use of cell phones: attending to business and being available for personal emergencies. But these have been so overused and misused as to be hardly acceptable anyway. People who are on call for work or personal crises probably shouldn't be out socializing or entertaining themselves, and they certainly shouldn't be disrupting these activities for the less burdened...
...brought it in was Thomas Jefferson, in his role as architect. Educated in Williamsburg, Virginia, he despised its provincial-English buildings as "rude, mis-shapen piles." Jefferson found his model for a new American architecture in the south of France: a Roman temple, the so-called Maison Carree, or Square House, which he felt exemplified the candid virtues of the old Roman state. It became the basis of his design for the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, completed in 1799. It was the first temple-form state building to be erected anywhere in 1,500 years--new because...
...monthly car payment, insecure? Diane Sawyer, whose haircut costs more than Peter Jennings' monthly car payment, unsure of herself? All those reporters who race to the scene of an airplane crash and shove their tape recorders in the faces of the survivors and ask them how they feel--those rude and ravenous news vultures are really quivering Jell-O molds of unease and self-doubt? Even Mike Wallace...