Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cold calm in the face of verbal provocation is the policeman's duty-even as it is the duty of a nurse in a hospital, or an attendant in an asylum. Rule No. 1 was laid down nearly 140 years ago, not long after Sir Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police, the first professional force in the English-speaking world. "No [officer] is justified in depriving anyone of his liberty for words only, and language, however violent . . . is not to be noticed. [A policeman] who allows himself to be irritated by any language whatsoever shows that...
...course, a verbal slip by a man famous for his bouts with the lan guage. Yet it said perhaps more than the mayor intended. Despite a 77-page official "white paper" and a blanket endorsement of his police by Daley him self, city authorities had yet to convince thousands who were there that the Chicago cops had been anything less than brutal to demonstrators, news men and almost anyone else who got in their way during the four days of the Democratic Convention...
...decrepit Teatro degli Animosi (Theater of the Courageous) in the Italian town of Carrara for bombs. Only after they had given the all clear did the Third International Congress of Anarchist Federations call itself to order-of a sort. As it turned out, there was more than enough verbal bombast to compensate for the lack of real bombs...
Bloodletting. Fortunately, there was no shooting. The demonstrators constantly taunted the police and in some cases deliberately disobeyed reasonable orders. Most of the provocations were verbal-screams of "Pig!" and fouler epithets. Many cops seemed unruffled by the insults. Policeman John Gruber joked: "We kind of like the word pig. Some of us answer our officers 'Oink, oink, sir,' just to show it doesn't bother us." The police reacted more angrily when the demonstrators sang God Bless America or recited "I pledge allegiance to the flag...
...postage-stamp stage, a man and a woman appear, wearing only card board and painted fig leaves. The woman also wears a black rubber bra with red rims designed to resemble huge sunglasses. What follows is verbal love play and a kind of spoofy striptease in which the twosome gingerly play on the supposed skittishness of the audience. After a mock wedding ceremony in front of a barber pole ("Do you, Pandy, take this girl Mandy, because she is randy?"), a climactic libation scene occurs. Pandy and Mandy put on green mitts the size of baseball gloves and sponge each...