Word: synonyms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Conqueror, showing how words have changed color through the ages. Before becoming a game, Badminton served variously as the name of an English country estate and a cooling drink. As late as 1848, "snoop" meant "to appropriate or consume dainties in a clandestine manner." The word doom was a synonym for statute until legal proceedings and human nature changed its meaning. Even though the microprinting can be read only with the accompanying magnifying glass, which makes for hard browsing, the whole O.E.D. in two volumes is the etymological buy of a decade...
Here is a world almost lost to the 20th century. For the peasant living equally with squealing animals and squalling children in his tiny plastered hut, "five hundred years are only yesterday." His half-feared, half-scorned authorities are the bishop-who uses "modern" as the synonym for "sinful" -and the handful of government bureaucrats with their forms and seals pettily executing justice and collecting taxes in moldering ducal palaces. Time has stuck at late feudalism. In "an aura of stopped drains and tinkling bells," bony, dull-eyed children full of resentment grow into "tentative" men and "bleak, stubborn women...
...George Hamilton's wife in a new motorcycle epic. She has remarried-this time to a struggling Los Angeles photographer named Roland Harrison, 33. Harrison hopes to become a successful freelancer, and his 25-year-old wife hopes to rise above her reputation as screendom's synonym for overheated pubescence...
Pentagon spokesman Jerry W. Friedheim has said that the South Vietnamese troops are engaged in "mobile maneuvering according to plan." When asked if the "mobile maneuvering" was a synonym for retreat, Friedheim answered...
...Educators talk gobbledygook about "non-abrasive systems intervention" and "low structure-low consideration teaching style." Another profession guilty of non-defense is lexicography. With proud humility today's dictionary editor abdicates even as arbiter, refusing to recognize any standards but usage. If enough people misuse disinterested as a synonym for uninterested, Webster's will honor it as a synonym. If enough people say infer when they mean imply, then that becomes its meaning in the eyes of a dictionary editor...