Word: suffixes
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...need to be reinforced with values. Take away the Federal Reserve and its dollar bill is waste paper. Take away meaning and a word is only noise. Changing chairman to chairperson is mock doctrine and flaccid democracy, altering neither the audience nor, in fact, the office holder. Despite its suffix, chairman is no more sexist than the French designation of "boat" as masculine, or the English custom of referring to a ship with feminine pronouns. Chairman is a role, not a pejorative. Congressman is an office, not a chauvinist plot. Mankind is a term for all humanity, not some...
...political power. But Connally is not a man for labels, and party loyalty to him is not the irrefutable ideal expounded by his close friend and longtime mentor. Lyndon Johnson. His dedication to the Democratic Party is not, as Sam Rayburn once characterized his own loyalty. "without prefix, without suffix and without apology." Connally is one to seize on the most advantageous combination of power and people, and in this regard the Vice-presidency under a Republican President may not be so unthinkable...
Likewise, New Yorker Music Critic Winthrop Sargeant attacked the suffix -wise, as in taxwise. He called it "a Madison Avenue locution which should be avoided by every civilized person." Author Basil Davenport grudgingly approved advise in the sense of notify. Even so, he ruled, it is permissible only "in business English and Army English, if there is any excuse for the existence of these bastard twins...
...ultimate accolade to an artist's consistency-in any medium-is the suffix "esque" at the end of his name. To say a film is "Felliniesque," for example, is to suggest operatic and surrealistic fantasies, or the mixture of brio and disgust with which Fellini views society. "Godardesque" implies the nervous tics and mannerisms of an artist whose creative palsy can produce intriguing collages but never a totally complete vision. "Antonioniesque" suggests the world as a chessboard, full of malignant surfaces and doomed figures. "Pennesque," "Nicholsesque," "Kubrick-esque"-the labels refuse to stick. Yet the time...
Flaming but unflappable, Clouseau rips off his trench coat, strides to the window and-wham! The chief inspector (Herbert Lorn) bursts through the bedroom door, the bedroom door clouts Clouseau in the suffix, Clouseau takes off as though there were lead as well as copper in his alloy. When next seen he is digging himself out of a gravel driveway two stories below and cringing as the chief inspector scornfully adds insult to injury. "Clouseau!" the old brute bellows. "You're off the case...