Word: vaguest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Could anyone reading those lines before President Nixon's inauguration have had the vaguest notion of what they were about? Not likely, which is the point William Safire makes in the introduction to his second edition of The New Language of Politics (Collier Books; $4.95), a lexicographic gallimaufry of political catch phrases. Safire, 42, a top Nixon speechwriter, published the first edition in 1968; the controlling theme was that political terms are among the most colorful and inventive in the English language, and that each new President creates neologisms. So do his opponents. Johnson gave us the Great Society...
When he started his work, Ungar had only the vaguest suspicions about the chemistry involved in this transfer of fear. But after repeated experimentation, he concluded that the message was coded in amino acid chains called peptides, which are small proteins. Finally, he narrowed the search to a single peptide-consisting of a sequence of 15 amino acids-that he named scotophobin, from the Greek words for dark and fear. To check his conclusion, Ungar asked Wolfgang Parr, a University of Houston chemist, to duplicate scotophobin using only off-the-shelf chemicals. The synthetic variety differed slightly from the natural...
...unexplored Sea of Rains, one of the oldest lunar maria. It lies some 1,400 miles northwest of the Sea of Fertility, where Luna 16 landed two months ago to scoop up 3.5 oz. of moon dust for later study on earth. At first, the Russians gave only the vaguest hints about Luna 17's mission. But once the rover demonstrated its maneuvering ability, they began revealing details of their moon machine...
...Rows of unfamiliar foodstuffs are appearing in middle-class cupboards: brown rice by the bucketful, as well as packages of aduki, granola, gomasio, ginseng and miso. Worried mothers are on the phone to each other whenever one of their children threatens to "go macrobiotic," for they have only the vaguest notion of what that means. Going organic poses another kind of problem, for that will mean that the Thanksgiving turkey must be imported from an organic farm for a dollar a pound. Even a formal wedding may nowadays be followed-to the dismay of hungry friends and relatives-with...
...never-ending scramble for a rapid dollar, Wall Street speculators can be moved to frenzy by the vaguest rumor. Their response to every economic fad and fancy is almost a conditioned reflex. In the uranium boom that followed World War II, the magic words atomic and nuclear rang through brokers' offices with the authority of an inside tip. Just about any company that managed to get that magic into its name, or to pass the word that it had even a fringe involvement in the field, enjoyed a profitable play in the market. Since then, the speculative incantation...