Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...trouble is that print is what McLuhan calls a "hot" medium of communication: sharp in definition, filled with data, exclusively visual and verbal, but (a key and debatable point) psychologically damaging and low in audience participation. Other hot media by McLuhan's rules are photography, movies, competitive spectator sports and radio. Hot media make men think logically and independently, instead of naturally, "mythically" and communally. This is bad. What McLuhan likes are cool media. These are fuzzy, low in information, but richly demanding on the audience to fill in what is missing. The telephone, modern painting, but pre-eminently...
...Like many another verbal ducat, the term was coined by Sir Winston Churchill, who in 1953 called for a "summit of nations" to settle East-West differences...
...long, loaded questions, McNamara cut in, requested permission to "clarify" the record. In a typical exchange involving the adequacy of military assistance to Greece and Turkey, McNamara snapped, "There is absolutely no question but what the Greek and Turkish forces are deficient in equipment, and no amount of verbal distortion will change that fact." Protested Passman, "I am not using any verbal distortion." McNamara shot back...
...crowds, a condemned murderer broken on the wheel, thieves stealing food with a pole through an open window, medical students digging up cadavers in deserted graveyards, little girls and boys sold into prostitution-Restif saw them all. And he set them down as he saw them, in odd, choppy verbal snapshots, some grotesque, a few funny, but all in appalling contrast to the occasional fine lady or powdered gentleman whose carriage splatters them with mud or casually kills someone...
Board v. Board. According to Phillips, his most serious error was that he got only verbal permission for his housing scheme from a zoning official, who now denies everything. When the neighbors yowled that the caboose violated the zoning code ban on any "eyesore or nuisance" in Miami, the local zoning board bucked the complaint to the county zoning department, which offered the suggestion that the caboose be painted green, hidden by shrubs and used only as a playhouse. That pleased neither side, so the case ascended to the zoning board of appeals, which ordered Phillips to remove the caboose...