Word: shibboleth
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...circumstance of Watergate. This unique scandal is far more than a criminal proceeding. It has involved not powerless defendants but some of the nation's most influential officials. There have been repeated attempts to suppress evidence, minimize the case's importance, deflect guilt and hide behind the shibboleth of national security. These factors at first inhibited the press. Now the urge is to print everything obtainable in the belief that self-censorship would be itself a kind of coverup. In this atmosphere, there will doubtless be some excesses. Though Kraft is right in warning against abuses, the entire...
...faulty reasoning of The Crimson and Councilperson Graham is most in evident in their opposition to a proposed redevelopment of the industrial and freight areas behind the river between M.I.T. and Cambridge. Again comes the oppositional shibboleth: no, make it housing for the poor -- even though the area is a wasteland and any housing would be isolated, and the people live anomic lives...
...system is out of joint, and neither Mr. Nixon's statistics nor Life's bright photographs can prove otherwise. Eight years of Eisenhower non-government have left an imposing backlog of business unfinished or never begun, and Mr. Nixon seeks to forestall any real action now with the shibboleth of "state and local initiative" and the bogeymen of "socialized medicine" and "Federal control of education." He points with pride to statistics showing Republican accomplishments in, for instance, school and hospital construction...
There are no aesthetic criteria for dealing with such works. If some artist shows a clutch of Polaroids of himself playing table tennis, this is called "information." But who is informed, and about what? "Information" has become the shibboleth of the '70s, a vogue word, as "flatness" was in the '60s and "gesture" was in the '50s. Information is somehow opposed to "culture." For all the pretense of entering the world out there, however, conceptual art remains inexorably culture-bound. Its very existence hinges on the privileged status of art itself, a status drilled into the world...
...Medicine and marriage do not mix, says the prevailing shibboleth. Doctors are so dedicated to their work, or exposed to so many tempting romantic opportunities, that they have more divorces than members of other professions. Not so, say Dr. Irving Rosow of the Langley Porter Institute and K. Daniel Rose, a senior medical student at the University of California. The pair recently analyzed all divorce, separate maintenance and annulment actions filed in California during a six-month period. Their report in California Medicine shows that doctors' marriages are, if anything, more stable than those of many other professionals. Authors...