Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Subtle traces of this vivid posturing are still evident years later in adulthood. Like the angered child, grownups often turn an open palm toward those who happen to pose a verbal threat, although the gesture may be quite inconspicuous and unconscious. Women, for example, tend to make a rapid hand-to-neck movement when they are agitated, disguising it as a hair-grooming gesture. Men also exhibit similar signs of stress. Embarrassed by such a driving miscue as accidentally cutting off another motorist, they will frequently make a seemingly irrelevant sweep of their hair. Actually, the gesture represents a very...
...this poisonously introspective era, when everyone talks of the unconscious and a few people believe in it. Heimert's verbal rough-housing may seem a flight from even the possibility of self-recognition. His own view of the constant alteration of point-of-view is that it is the most direct form of personal education. "What else can you mean by consciousness expanding," he asks, "than the attempt to comprehend all the life styles in an age?" This is his short-hand way of expressing the old desire for transcendance. A man who is noting, after all, is potentially everything...
...announcements merely "impolitic" or "stupid." His confidence in words and the possibility of making sense may appear out of place in these McLuhanesque times, but for a man who insists that reality begins and ends with the Word, there may be no other choice. "Most of the anti-verbal, anti-logical activity I see is stimulation, not communication," he says. Whatever value it has to individuals, it is not conceivably the basis on which a culture can be sustained...
...good deal less of the much-vilified Yearbook writing than usual. What copy there is, though, primarily concerns some of the most tedious identity crises ever recorded. Apparently the book is out to capture what the Harvard experience feels like rather than what happened here last year, but the verbal talent to bring off such an enterprise is nowhere to be found in Three Thirty Three. The editors have consistently let slip past their red pencils verbosity ("the University has long been cognizant of the fact that the issues involved transcend the sphere of economics"), turgid metaphor ("Girls...
Levin's style won him all but two matches this spring. The verbal psyche helped. Last weekend, playing with Rocky Jarvis at first doubles, Levin had just missed a devastating forehand slam. Glancing at his Yale opponent and breaking into a grin he said, "I really wanted to demolish you that time." The Yale tandem fell...