Word: spiros
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...mending and uses constitutional means to that end. Today's radical thinks today's society should be junked and cares little about what means he uses. This difference, among others, is more important than what radicals and liberals have in common: a tendency, for instance, to deplore Spiro Agnew-an impulse that has incited people who are neither radicals nor liberals...
They order these matters better in the natural sciences. Chemistry would not have improved much since Lavoisier's youth if chemists were still loosely calling all combustible materials phlogiston. The word oxygen means what it means, and neither Humpty Dumpty nor Spiro Agnew can alter that. New things-or newly discovered things -need new names. When a new microorganism swims into the biologist's ken, he does not reach back into folklore and call it a "small dragon"; he quarries the lexicon of a very dead language and concocts, say, "staphylococcus," a word never known before on land...
...fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field." Clearly, this indicates that inventing names was to be an important function of his race. Contemporary Adam, confronting the menagerie of his own political attitudes, says: "This one is a gryphon. That one is a unicorn." Or, like Spiro Agnew, he invents hybridized contradictions: "That one is a gryphon unicorn." Lexicographically speaking, this Eden is hell...
...Rafferty is to California education what Spiro Agnew is to national politics-a spellbinder of alliterative conservatism. Eight years ago, Rafferty swept the nonpartisan race for state Superintendent of Public Instruction by denouncing "permissive, pragmatic progressivism." He lost a loud bid for the Senate two years ago, but has since delighted his admirers by advocating mass searches for drugs in student lockers, by presenting guidelines for "moral instruction" that criticized pacifism, and by urging science teachers to give "equal time" to the Adam and Eve account of creation...
While the show was in rehearsal, the producers offered it to the Nixon Administration. Their premiere took place at a White House luncheon, and their next gig was a Memphis fund-raising banquet where they played opposite the va-va-va-voom rhetoric of Spiro Agnew. A follow-up Tennessee State Fair appearance was taped for presentation on the Ed Sullivan Show. All that will ultimately lead, Mann hopes, to an original-cast album, a cross-country tour and a weekly TV series. The whole prospect, he says, gives him goose pimples...