Word: swarmming
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Those who wished to turn back earlier waves of immigration sometimes used the same language, or worse. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin asked, "Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and, by herding together, establish their language and manners, to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them?" Some 80 years later, Boston Mayor Theodore Lyman called the Irish "a race that will never be infused into our own, but on the contrary...
...laissez-faire obliviousness, which amounts to the same thing. Partly too, it is the reassurance of being among one's own kind. * An immigrant from almost any country can depend on finding transplanted countrymen in the city. But there is also something appealing, it seems, about joining the larger swarm of immigrants in New York, of being on a patch that is in turn part of a patchwork quilt. Where practically everyone is an alien, no one is alien. "There is a feeling of cordiality," says Anand Mohan, a Queens College politics professor from India, "and, for us, a satisfaction...
...earlier word was "quality," whose utterance was meant to mark off a given artwork from the swarm of others and confirm the precision of a collector's taste. Interesting has the opposite effect. It suspends judgment, covers the rear, and defends the vacuum-cleaner habits of a cultural mass market without precedent in art history. It states, with a sort of coy defiance, that buying this, uh, thang may not be a mistake, even though its owner does not know what to say about it. It acknowledges that by the time thoughtful aesthetic judgment is passed -- a distant prospect, given...
...reason for this swarm of organizations and conferences is that Geneva has few peers in such conveniences as luxurious hotels (12,000 rooms in all), myriad telex lines and multilingual interpreters. Says a U.S. diplomat: "Geneva is an ideal place to talk. It has square rooms, long rooms, high- ceilinged rooms, rectangular tables, round tables and horseshoe-shaped tables. It has restaurants, great shops, beautiful mountains and a lake...
...their tight leather-and-spandex costumes crisscrossed with garish black and yellow stripes. Piles of makeup, spiky hair and enough dangling chains to tie up half the elephants in Africa complete the picture of the up-to-date heavy-metal rock group. Even the music, the sound of a swarm of angry insects electronically amplified several thousand times, fits the image. But wait; don't walk away without listening to the words of their song...