Word: thingness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There is little if any hope that euphemisms will ever be excised from mankind's endless struggle with words that, as T. S. Eliot lamented, bend, break and crack under pressure. For one thing, certain kinds of everyday euphemisms have proved their psychological necessity. The uncertain morale of an awkward teen-ager may be momentarily buoyed if he thinks of himself as being afflicted by facial "blemishes" rather than "pimples." The label "For motion discomfort" that airlines place on paper containers undoubtedly helps the squeamish passenger keep control of his stomach in bumpy weather better than if they were...
...oddest thing about the event was that Alice Springs is 1,000 miles from the sea, and the Todd, which has flowed only five times in the past ten years, was dry as a bone. Henley-on-Todd is the Aussies' put-down of England's very proper Henley-on-Thames Regatta. Fun it may be, but it also involves work: slogging through the sand of the riverbed is exhausting...
...gambit failed. For one thing, the Christian Democrats were able to cut the leftist vote by warning that the Communists would turn the proud republic into "a Czechoslovakia." Even the importation of some 4,000 mostly leftist émigrés by bus, train and taxi could not salvage the Communists' hopes. For another thing, there were those 450 safe votes flown in from the U.S., which helped the ruling coalition to hang on to all but one of the 39 seats that it was defending in the 60-man council. If the well-heeled Christian Democrats thought...
...that the meeting "will affect every religious group in the country in the next decade." Keynoter Oswald C. J. Hoffmann (see box) continued the warmup, warning the delegates: "If the Gospel is demonstrated only vocally and not vitally in the everyday actions of Christ's followers, the whole thing becomes a farce." The next morning Graham's evangelist brother-in-law Leighton Ford roundly chastised the delegates...
...Eliot and F. R. Leavis who agreed on nothing but shared a belief that their literary squabbles were deadly serious engagements in a battle for the keys to the kingdom of the mind. Scientists, today's high priests, may regard their theories as the most important thing on earth; after all, there is the conquered moon to prove it. But once Carlyle could say, and be believed, that the man of letters is "our most important modern person." Since then, something has happened to reduce the bookman to a mere bookworm. The man of letters, according to Evelyn Waugh...