Word: stab
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...fusty world of lexicography, new dictionaries are usually introduced with the quiet circumspection generally found in library reading rooms. Though Random House made a stab at mass promotion on its 1966 dictionary, such works rarely generate much publicity. The alltime exception to the rule is the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which was brought out last September with the kind of hoopla usually reserved for new detergents. In four months, 440,000 copies were marketed. The dictionary became the biggest-selling hard-cover book published in 1969, ahead of Portnoy's Complaint and The Selling...
...deeper. This is deeper than the way it's done in the South, and it isn't as open. There they say, 'Nigger, I don't like you, so what you gonna do about it?' Here they smile in your face and then stab you in the back...
...Americans, expressed the especially virulent outrage of the poorer Middle Americans. "The professional liberals let the genie out of the bottle?racial hatred, lawlessness," says Deac. The backlash today is not so much against blacks per se as against black militancy and the white intellectuals: "The Moratorium was a stab in the back to our boys on the firing lines. Our families don't have long-haired brats?they'd tear the hair off them. Our boys don't smoke pot or raise hell or seek deferments. Our people are too busy making a living and trying to be good...
...defensive, and they raised an issue that has long stirred controversy in the U.S.: civilian limitations on the use of military power. Most top military officers refrain from public alibis, criticism and rebukes. But many privately agree with Westmoreland's complaint, and there are signs that a stab-in-the-back, or Versailles, complex is developing. Some officers contend that they were not permitted to move quickly, massively and without restrictions-either on bombing targets or in hitting enemy sanctuaries along Viet Nam's borders-once the decision was made in 1965 to commit U.S. combat troops. This...
...even more basic argument against any stab-in-the-back theory is that the military only belatedly made the case for an all-out effort. Especially in the conflict's early years, the professionals of war were thinking in the old way of victory on the battlefield, and troops conventionally trained by the U.S. were a little like the British redcoats fighting in lines as they engaged in forest skirmishes against the American colonists and their Indian allies. Clumsy U.S. battalions in the mid-1960s were out of place in the jungles, swamps and highlands of South Viet...