Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...speech-elaborately phrased, rich with allusions-sounds like another language amid the staccato din of the New Frontier's verbal shorthand. With his ironic, self-deprecating wit, he often appears to be some misplaced elfin uncle among the intense young men who laugh at their well-worn house jokes only rarely-and hardly ever at themselves...
...League is a resistance movement against overreliance on objective tests in deciding who gets in. Last week the movement got new support from Columbia's undergraduate admissions director, Henry S. Coleman, who voiced some doubts about the most sacrosanct test of all, the college board verbal aptitude exam...
Usually the gates slam on an Ivy applicant who scores below 550 in the test (scored from 200 to 800), but last year Columbia experimentally took a chance on 72 hopefuls who had done just that. Coleman happily reports that 69 of them passed Columbia's most highly verbal freshman courses, English A and Contemporary Civilization A, and that 16 of them ranked in the top half of the freshman class. Mediocre verbal scores, Coleman concludes, "do not accurately measure the well-motivated student's ability to survive, and in some cases to prosper, in a rigorous academic...
First, it is necessary to remember that the effect of any stimulus--verbal or nonverbal, artificial or natural--depends upon the set and the setting; your expectations and your environmental situation. Consider such words as "drug" or "doctor" or "dean." Your reaction to such words depends on your set and the situation. Nonverbal stimuli such as consciousness-expanding drugs intensify experience many fold--but their effect similarly depends on the set and setting. Historically, expansive words and expansive drugs often been seen as dangerous and "mind-distorting" and administrators have been pressed to impose controls. But history also teaches...
These drugs are powerful nonverbal mind-altering substances--probably the most powerful ever known to man. Now any stimulus, verbal or nonverbal, which presents itself to the nervous system changes the bio-chemistry of your nervous system. If you want to play the labelling game you can call some of these changes dangerous and others beneficial. You can label some artificial and others natural. Compare this to the written word. Can the written word be dangerous? Is the written word natural? Are nonverbal stimuli such as the sacred mushroom of Mexico artificial? Is the chemical essence of the mushroom dangerous...