Word: verb
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Topping the list of shopworn journa-ese was the verb "hail," a pet of head-ine writers (MAYOR HAILS HOMETOWN HERO) as well as reporters ("New Yorkers hailed their first rain in six weeks"). Univac awarded second place to the phrase "violence flared," third place to "flatly denied." The rest of the runners-up: "racially troubled," "voters marched to the polls," "jampacked," "usually reliable sources," "backlash," "kickoff" (as applied to anything but a football game), "limped into port," "gutted by fire,-" "death and destruction," "riot-torn," "strife-torn," "tinder-dry woodlands," "in the wake of," "no immediate comment," "guarded optimism...
...various messages with details that only the murderer could have known. Jean-Luc had told him, the killer reported, how he had run away from home after lifting 15 francs from his mother's purse. He was tired of doing his homework (his last assignment: to conjugate the verb rire, to laugh), and when he left his parents' house on Paris' middle-class Rue de Naples, he was wearing a tan corduroy jacket and carrying a Bugs Bunny comic book. He had a spot of mercurochrome on one leg ("I can no longer remember which," the killer apologized...
Once upon the Champs-Elysees, every girl had bee-stung lips and hips, and hair that could tumble into a pavilion of sex. With a kind of languorous felinity, all those women looked like the perfect tense of the verb avoir. The storied avenue might as well have been called the Rue Bardot...
...more that he composed himself. But also, as The Merry Muses makes startlingly clear, he scrubbed and reworked some of these materials to create some of his most famous poems. One such poem with a bawdy original is Comin' Thro' the Rye, in which a much earthier verb appears in the line: "Gin a body kiss a body/ Need a body cry." Another ballad, John Anderson, My Jo, is known to every schoolboy as a touching tribute to the strength of marital affection in old age: its source, doubtless known to every schoolboy in all Scotland, turns...
Negociar, or Discutir. The sticking point was a matter of semantics-a single verb in the agreement, but an all-important one. The Spanish-language version read "negociar"-to negotiate. The English version read "discuss." Panamanians insisted that since the working language of the OAS meetings was Spanish, their version was correct, and suggested that U.S. Envoy Martin, who does not speak Spanish, was confused. At first, the diplomats considered using the word discutir. But a Spanish-language purist objected that discutir implied argumentative discussion. Thus negociar, a softer word that means both discuss and negotiate, was substituted. Unconfused...