Word: vermin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Philadelphia's tough-talking Democratic mayor, Frank Rizzo, has long been as hard on syntax as he is on the "vermin" he blames for his city's problems with crime and decline. During his campaign for a second four-year term in 1975, for instance, the blustery former police chief offered Philadelphians a typically unpunctuated promise: "Just wait after November you'll have a front row seat because I'm going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot...
...once a Peace Corps volunteer, reports: "The poverty in the black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods on the West Side of Chicago is worse than any poverty I saw in West Africa. The people there are guided by strong traditional values. They do not live in constant fear of violence, vermin and fire. You don't find the same sense of desperation and hopelessness you find in the American ghetto...
...caves that served as their home, Mao once discovered that Chiang Ch'ing had bedded down on a heap of bedbugs. Mao formally renamed the cave "Bedbug Headquarters" and helped start an "extermination campaign "against the vermin. Another time, during a difficult mountain march in a driving rainstorm, she was wearing the only rain cape in the entire army. Though it was soggy, she offered it to him-and he reluctantly accepted. (This, observes Witke, was a personal victory for her.) A little later, he removed a thermos flask of liquor from his belt and silently passed...
...union official about the environmentalists: "Those kooks are out of their minds to bring this up right now." He predicts that about 800 bottle-manufacturing jobs will be lost in his state if the proposed ban takes effect. Truckers in Massachusetts charge that their vehicles will become infested with vermin if they are forced to carry dirty bottles back to recycling centers. Others warn that the bottle proposals will cost the average consumer $100 a year and will not limit littering. Says one anti-bottle bill campaigner: "A slob is still a slob, and a 5?or 10? deposit...
Millions of people marching along the broad avenues of Peking and Shanghai. Walls in every city plastered with posters attacking new ideological victims as "traitors," "bandits," "worms" and "vermin." During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69, that was the way China's radicals denounced their political enemies. Last week, the former persecutors had clearly become victims. Within days after the arrest of the country's top radicals (TIME, Oct. 25), China had been roused to full fighting pitch against them. The marches and mass rallies seemed carefully designed to fuel the myth of a spontaneous, popular uprising against...