Word: tainted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...viewers at the midnight show in the local art house. The Zeitgeist of that generation is now wildly reversed. Public figures who used pot at that time express regret for the transgression. Political survival demands that they not offend the new cultural norm. Marijuana use now carries a moral taint...
...Ginsburg's marijuana use was greeted with revulsion not because of its illegality, but because of its perceived intrinsic moral taint. Even without law, it is something that demands contrition. Why? Because, to summarize much that has been said on the subject, it is a decadent, nihilistic, frivolous giving over of one's consciousness and self-control to the pleasures of a waking stupor. Fine. But any moral reasoning that leads you to call immoral that kind of self-surrender must lead you to conclude the same about drinking, which can get you to a stretch of Lethe-land right...
...Michael Kinsley of the "TRB" column in the New Republic notes, "Lobbying is an ideal illustration of TRB's Law of Scandal, which holds that the scandal isn't what's illegal; the scandal is what's legal." The practices revealed at the Deaver trial not only taint former officials who peddle their connections but also raise questions about the ethics of corporate America. Besides, they are often wasteful: TWA could not withstand the Icahn takeover...
...APPEARANCE OF the Student Council questionnaire officially opens the long-expected investigation into the subject of private tutoring schools. Hitherto the whole subject has been treated with a sort of hush-hush secrecy, as if the famed "cram" parlors were sacrosanct pillars of Harvard society and above the taint of investigation or suspicion. With the enrollment lists these institutions growing steadily each year and with an annual scandal involving similarity of term themes among habitues, both the University and the Council have chosen a splendid occasion to launch this new drive against what may in time become a distinct detriment...
...American political debate, the words covert and secret have lost all meaning. It is not just that, as the European traveler invariably notes, Americans are more open and informal in their social relations. It is that the very idea of secrecy carries a moral taint. Americans are passionately democratic, and thus acutely sensitive to the contradiction between democracy, with its promise and premise of openness, and the secret world of diplomatic and paramilitary intrigue...