Word: seeps
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Jargon, the sublanguage peculiar to any trade, contributes to euphemism when its terms seep into general use. The stock market, for example, rarely "falls" in the words of Wall Street analysts. Instead it is discovered to be "easing" or found to have made a "technical correction" or "adjustment." As one financial writer notes: "It never seems to 'technically adjust' upward." The student New Left, which shares a taste for six-syllable words with Government bureaucracy, has concocted a collection of substitute terms for use in politics. To "liberate," in the context of campus uproars, means to capture...
...warranty obligation to the purchaser of a new car. A Plymouth station wagon had been driven only two weeks when its owner was overcome by carbon monoxide and suffered brain damage. Some plugs normally placed in holes in the body were found to be missing, enabling the gas to seep into the car. Chrysler argued that the laws governing its highly publicized five-year warranty should be controlling. Not persuaded, the court added Alaska to a growing list of states that now make manufacturers strictly liable for any defect that ought not to exist-warranties not withstanding. The object, said...
...that thrives on the absence of a looking-glass"), she projects well-bred sexiness on the screen. In the hands of Luigi Leopardi, a chimerical Roman director, she becomes "the English Lady-Tiger." The public image is painstakingly built up by the movie company, and inevitably it begins to seep into Annabel's psyche. Her husband Frederick, an intelligent, surly man, is a much-photographed adjunct of the image, and when he sees his wife retreating into fantasy, he dramatically kills himself at the spot commemorating the martyrdom of St. Paul. Why? To shock Annabel back to herself...
...real villain is the pointlessness of life, and in Paris literary circles this is a very fashionable villain indeed. Author Le Clézio, 27, frankly enjoys life himself-he is an ardent jazz and movie buff-but he is much too clever to let the fact seep into his books. If he had to choose a bedside volume, he says, it would be Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps Le Clézio should reread that work more closely. As Tweedledum remarked of Alice's weeping: "I hope you don't suppose those are real tears...
Useless Hole. The lines were the filed-down ridges of bronze that seep between the pieces of a mold when a statue has been sand-cast in sections, but this technique was not developed until the 14th century. The ancients used the lost-wax process that produced a seamless, one-piece mold-and a statue with no ridges on it. Another giveaway was a tiny hole on the top of the horse's head. Such holes are common on the life-size marble horses found on the Acropolis: the Greeks fitted spikes in them to keep the birds away...