Word: sermons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...daughter, who is named Moon Unit Zappa. "Val" is really a sort of satire of slang, a goof on language and on the dreamily dumb and self-regarding suburban kids who may actually talk like that. It would come out all wrong if a minister were to compose his sermon in Val. "The Lord is awesome," he would have to begin. "He knows that life can sometimes be, like, grody-grody to the max! Fer shirr...
...before the canonization, terrorists, armed with hand grenades and submachine guns, killed a two-year-old boy and wounded 38 other Jews leaving festival services in Rome's largest synagogue. In his sermon honoring Kolbe, the Pope said, "The tragic fate of so many Jews destroyed without pity in the concentration camps has already been condemned, firmly and irrevocably, by the conscience of humanity. But unfortunately, even in our own time criminal episodes of anti-Semitic hatred are repeated." He then denounced the "execrable attack" of the preceding day. Jewish leaders nonetheless complained bitterly that the Pope...
Paul Dickson knows all those things because he collects words with what he calls "a zeal that borders on the compulsive." Does this mean yet another Safiresque sermon on proper usage and the maintenance of grammatical traditions? No, Dickson has no ideological purpose. He is the amiable spieler who wrote such frivolities as The Great American Ice Cream Book and The Mature Person's Guide to Kites, Yo-Yos, Frisbees . . . As for words, he nuzzles them all with puppyish enthusiasm...
...game. In his autocratic passion, Steinbrenner, alas, exaggerates the worst traits of modern baseball: its crassness and faithlessness and shallow nastiness. He will not collaborate in the illusion, a form of American mysticism, really, that is baseball's most precious accomplishment. George is a regular walking sermon on the pointlessness of everything once the joy has vanished...
Perhaps the frankest moment of the Pope's visit came during his sermon at Luján, when John Paul declared that he had come to Argentina "as the pilgrim of difficult moments." It was an apt phrase, well-earned during his. trip to Britain and doubly so in Argentina. There was no time-and no maneuvering room-for the diplomatic niceties that helped to give his British trip a less political flavor. While he could and did avoid a visit with Prime Minister Thatcher, who serves as head of government only, he could not make the same distinction...