Word: syntax
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...often confusing, especially for the young. The problem goes well beyond thee and thou or verb forms like loveth. Numerous words have changed meaning over the centuries. In current terms feeble-minded in 1 Thessalonians 5: 14 ("Comfort the feebleminded, support the weak ...") actually means fainthearted. Today King James syntax is hard going for a general public better attuned to thrillers than Shakespeare...
Very few of the president's individual sentences carry any meaning. His syntax is jumbled, and his penchant for pronouns makes it difficult to follow the rhetorical conversations he constructs with unseen political opponents. He occasionally explains his vagueness with an unabasned admission of never having thought about a particular question before...
...year-old artists who are content to repeat their own formal inventions as clichés. Most, though not all, of Nevelson's work is free from that tendency. If she is not one of the great formal innovators of modern sculpture-and her contribution to its syntax cannot fairly be compared with Picasso's, Tatlin's, Brancusi's or even David Smith's-she has a very deep reservoir of feeling that has infused her art and saves it from looking arid or repetitious. As a sculptor of feeling, her only peer among living...
Putting aside my desire to mumble something about the pot calling the ketle black-TIME having scrambled more syntax than Professor Backwards-I appreciate the cry for better editing of books...
Naturally, no candidate says he deliberately misleads the press, or confesses to repeating himself constantly to avoid the risk of saying something new. But candid admissions of such practices by their predecessors are beginning to turn up in the history books. Remember Eisenhower's contorted syntax in press conferences? Jim Hagerty, Ike's press secretary, was worried about what the President might say about the 1955 Quemoy-Matsu crisis, but Ike reassured him: "Don't worry, Jim, if that question comes up, I'll just confuse them...