Word: underclasses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years, the moral will to advance the cause of blacks through Government action has waned, a function of straitened budgets and a kind of cultural recoil from the principles of Johnson's Great Society. The black middle class has grown and in many ways prospered, and yet the black underclass has hardened into a cruel permanence. Says Charles Stith, pastor of Boston's Union United Methodist Church and a highly regarded black activist: "Martin Luther King fought for our rights to ride in the front of the bus. But folks still can't afford to ride the front...
...home. We are also aware of two agreeable things about Hughes. The first is that he has a nice, easy gift for unforced farce (see Ferris Bueller's Day Off). The other is that his teen romances (see Pretty in Pink) have always insisted that the American underclass is actually superior to its middle-class betters in worldly wisdom and moral acuity. Both his comic virtue and his social vision are on pleasant display here...
...literature of journalistic sleaze. Lawrence Kramer, an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, exudes the resentment of a young man who has to live in a small, narrow, $888-a-month apartment ("a slot") with his wife, new baby and nurse (paid for by his mother-in-law). The underclass is represented mainly by ghetto felons: armed robbers who list their occupations as "security guards" and young drug pushers who have mastered "the Pimp Roll," a swaggering gait not uncommon on the city's streets...
...entries, most of them words that have come into use since 1966. The field of business and finance has contributed its share (greenmail, golden parachute), as have science and technology (string theory, user friendly), government (disinformation, -gate as an all-purpose suffix for scandals), social trends (yuppie, underclass) and relations between the sexes (significant other, palimony...
...that the Brits are going to catch with that one is a few harmless former spies eking out their pensions with ripping yarns about the bad old days in MI5. No, what they need over there is an Unofficial Secrets Act -- something that will stop the English underclass from converting squalid youthful memories into rude, shrewd, occasionally lewd movies of the kind that have lately been jostling away at one another -- and at our innocent colonial funny bones. As a group they form a kind of Disasterpiece Theater, more blithely brutal than typically British, and likely to prove ruinous...