Word: speaking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...through the tunnel, I was walking behind an old lady with no shoes or socks who was skipping and singing "Here We Go Loopty-Loo." I followed her to a table and asked her if I could sit down; I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could still speak. She said...
...other City and state officials strongly oppose the plan. The Boston City Council voted unanimously two weeks ago in opposition to the site, and Louise Day Hicks, now a candidate for the City Council, has been invited to speak against the plan at the hearing...
...spent a month with the Resistance after the Humphrey demonstration in September planning the same kind of reception for Nixon. We were going to have loudspeakers and a ladder and we were going to toss it up as Nixon began to speak and ask him about the war and the draft. Then some members of Progressive Labor Party came to our nightly planning sessions. They were against the war too, but they wanted to know what our demonstrations were supposed to accomplish...
...persistent source of modern euphemisms is the feeling, inspired by the prestige of science, that certain words contain implicit subjective judgments, and thus ought to be replaced with more "objective" terms. To speak of "morals" sounds both superior and arbitrary, as though the speaker were indirectly questioning those of the listener. By substituting "values," the concept is miraculously turned into a condition, like humidity or mass, that can be safely measured from a distance. To call someone "poor," in the modern way of thinking, is to speak pejoratively of his condition, while the substitution of "disadvantaged" or "underprivileged," indicates that...
...tolerable." It is virtuous, but a bit beside the point, to contend that lies are deplorable. So they are; but they cannot be moralized or legislated away, any more than euphemisms can be. Verbal miasma, when it deliberately obscures truth, is an offense to reason. But the inclination to speak of certain things in uncertain terms is a reminder that there will always be areas of life that humanity considers too private, or too close to feelings of guilt, to speak about directly. Like stammers or tears, euphemisms will be created whenever men doubt, or fear, or do not know...