Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Despite angry protests from students (whose defiance, however, was largely verbal), the faculty stuck to its ban on smoking in lecture halls and classrooms. President Goheen noted that the new restrictions matched those at Harvard and Yale, but quickly explained that they were put in effect only to save money on refinishing the tobacco-stained floors of classrooms and lecture halls...
...tends to defeat them: Anouilh's long play has the weaknesses without the high compensatory moments of Murder in the Cathedral. In its 22 scenes, Becket offers all manner of effective pageantry and colloquy and confrontation, even of wenching and horseplay; it runs up and down a whole verbal keyboard, playful trills and prayerful chords and swelling harmonies...
...argued that Powers was not really a spy: he had not been caught in espionage on Russian soil, but had merely been flying in the open skies at the command of his Government. Echoed Barbara Powers: "He should have been called a scout for our Government." It was a verbal distinction not likely to go far in a Russian court...
...right hand, flashing baby-blue eyes and a wolfish grin, he states his theme and takes off like a jazz musician on a flight of improvisation-or seeming improvisation. He does not tell jokes one by one, but carefully builds deceptively miscellaneous structures of jokes that are like verbal mobiles. He begins with the spine of a subject, then hooks thought onto thought; joke onto dangling joke, many of them totally unrelated to the main theme, till the whole structure spins but somehow balances. All the time he is building toward a final statement, which is too much part...
...terms such as chick, drag, gasser, cool it, bug, dig, weirdo and all that jazz. He also mixes in a never-ending supply of phrases parodying academic jargon ("We must learn to differentiate between generic and relative terms"). Between jokes, he draws on a fat little glossary of verbal rialtos that counterpoint the laughter, indicate his attitude to the material. "Wild, huh?" he will say, standing in the ruins of his most recent target, or "You can't go too far, fellas," or "Is there any group I haven't offended...