Word: singularizing
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...SHORT history of rock and roll festivals is circumscribed by three singular events: the Monterey Festival, the Lake Bethel Festival, and a day-long concert at the Altamont Speedway. Each event's claim to singularity is by this time a matter of commonly received opinion: as our commentators have it. Monterey marked the apotheosis of the San Francisco-based flower culture, the Bethel concert (Woodstock) was the great coming together for, in its advertisement's words, three days of Love, Peace and Music, and Altamont the death of flower-power, the death of Love, the death of Rock, depending...
White House regulars may notice one singular change from the usual presidential party: instead of the Marine Band, which prides itself as "the President's own," the Army Strings will play, their first time at any major White House event. The only Marines will be a harpist and flutist providing back ground music in the Diplomatic Reception Room. There is a reason, whispers a White House source: the Nixons feel that the Army has had to suffer so many indignities of late, so much at tack from within, that this is one small way to honor...
...sides, ostensibly well-educated people in full command of the English language talk about the media in this singular fashion. "The media is to blame for all the trouble," "The media carries only bad news," or (on rare occasions) "The media is the first defense line of American liberties." Webster's, that horror of permissiveness, allows the usage. It is, of course, illiterate: "media" is the plural of "medium"; hence the media are. The point may seem merely pedantic. But how people speak suggests a great deal about how they think and feel; language shapes philosophy, culture and destiny...
...mental habit of reducing plural words to the singular has been evident before. A case in point is "data," beloved of all social scientists. Data no longer are; they is. "The data is incomplete" or "the data is compelling" turns the concept into a kind of glob-a paste or putty that can be applied to any rickety argument. The origin, quality and meaning of the individual figures are easily forgotten; one data is as good as another data...
Benumbing News. This process energized Warhol's images of disaster-the car crashes, the electric chairs, the mushroom clouds and paintings like Red Race Riot, 1963-with singular force. A distillation had been made of the benumbing repetition of bad news in order to show that one should not be numbed. Characteristically, Warhol denied any such slant. Neither approval nor disapproval: the news photographs that produced these silk screens, he claimed, "just happened to be lying around," and he did not pick them. But why were they lying around? For all his elaborations of cool, Warhol has an apocalyptic...