Word: verbalizations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...White House tapes spun in relentless revelation, they emitted a verbal cacophony offending those stalwart upholders of the exigenicies of the nations's grammar and the subtleties of its idiomatic charm. The defenders of lucid prose shuddered at the mangled sentences--the pronouns without antecedents, the flabby modifiers, the split infinitives, the undue use of the passive voice, the malevolent creeping of coarse phraseology. A nation stood appalled that the language of Jefferson, of Webster, of Emerson, Melville, and Mencken could be contorted into such a mockery of America's verbal heritage...
...time he wrote that essay, Orwell had become a man without a country. The physical destruction that had overwhelmed Europe and the verbal destruction that so threatened the medium of his thought induced in him the feeling that he was defending humanity from the onslaughts of a civilized society gone barbarian. "Politics and the English Language" was written by a humble man who wanted to keep language itself humble and accessible. He wanted English redeemed as a tool to aid in the task of rebuilding society on the humanistic foundation the War had undermined...
...From the verbal standpoint, Newman writer, Watergate was a lengthly catalogue of the type of flaccid phrase so common in society today: "One of the things the Watergate hearings revealed was a poverty of expression, an inability to say anything in a striking way, an addiction to a language that was almost denatured, and in which what little humor did occur was usually unintentional...
JEREMIADS SUCH AS these Newman makes against the state-of-the-union's language are as old as the day Babylonian scholars compiled a text on "Style and Form of Hieroglyphics." Any nabob with alert ears and open eyes can natter negativism about decadence in American, verbal or otherwise. More important than the fact of degeneracy are the reasons behind it. Newman does make a stab at why the American language has become so cheapened. While Watergate was making its contribution, he writes, "a different process has been under way in another sector, where respect for rules has been breaking...
...about the contact, a kind of tendency to achieve the lowest common denominator, a kind of talking about food, or talking about where you might go to get something to eat, or a grinding of a private joke down into nothingness, or little comments on little personality characteristics or verbal quirks or whatever of somebody in the group that can go on to the point where you feel that the whole group is working to protect anybody in the group from having any kind of intense contact with anybody else. These groups will sometimes last two years. You have...