Word: shorthand
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...talk as if my family live in a stately home and don't have to work. My ancestors were mainly teachers, vicars, profs and bishops - careers which might require a top-of-the-range voice. That may explain why I speak a distinctly upmarket version of received pronunciation (RP) - shorthand for the standard English of bbc newsreaders. Which is fine if you want to marry a landowner or work in a top art auction house, but not so much fun if you just want to fade into the background. People make assumptions: men think I'll boss them, employers think...
What's with the rash of wussy love interests? Why all the "unsuccessful architects" (movie shorthand for men who cannot, so to speak, get things up)? Is this the great revolution wrought by the ascent of women to the heads of studios? Is it because guys with real jobs and some sense of purpose, let alone captains of industry, simply aren't funny? ("Ladies and gentlemen, the adorable antics of Ben Bernanke!") Is it just another attack from liberal Hollywood, constantly harping about the buffoon who keeps messing things up and his smart, attractive Right-Hand Woman...
...be time to retire Caspar David Friedrich's The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog from further use on a book cover. Lovely as it is, this painting has done enough time as shorthand for a sentiment along the lines of "Man is so small, the world about him so vast, gaze on it with me, won't you?" Then again, sometimes exactly that sentiment is called for. Such is the case with Jason Roberts' A Sense of the World (HarperCollins; 382 pages), an enthralling biography of a man you've never heard of named James Holman...
...Lanark,” Alasdair Gray’s hefty first novel, is often called the “Scottish Ulysses.” The term is a reductive one, a kind of shorthand for any book that comes from the edges of the British Isles, documents the internal struggles of a young man, and experiments heavily with form. Granted, this may seem like a rather limited class of books; but no category, however specific, can hold this novel: though Gray—as much as any modern writer—owes a debt to Joyce, “Lanark?...
...Politics meetings and workshops on constitutional crisis.In the second place, Truth opposes Lying. Two particularly significant lies will stand in here for the current epidemic of civic dishonesty in the U.S.—and by now this jeremiad has begun to seem hopelessly unhip (or, in the current shorthand, “partisan”). It is not suave to be indignant about public lying. But like error, lying violates ideals to which universities in particular are dedicated. Medicare’s chief actuary calculated in 2003, before Congress voted on the prescription-drug benefit, a 10-year cost...