Word: wimp
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...started when Republican Robert Dornan of California, in a speech before a conservative group, called New York Democrat Thomas Downey "a draft-dodging wimp." Downey heard about it and a couple of days later, as Dornan was walking out of the House chamber, put a hand on the Californian's arm to prevent him from leaving. Asked Downey: "Did you say those things about me?" Dornan wheeled around. "Yes. So what?" Moments later, Dornan grabbed the babyfaced New Yorker by the collar and tie, pulled him close and warned, "Stay out of my face, now and forever...
Asked to define wimp, Dornan says, "Someone who attacks someone behind his back and doesn't say it to his face." The word was bandied about during the 1984 presidential campaign, when both Walter Mondale and George Bush found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to show that they were not wimps. Few dictionaries include the word; it may surprise some who use it that, according to Eric Partridge's slang dictionary, it means "a (young) woman," perhaps from "whimper...
...Angeles, plays like the Beat It video at feature length. Fandango sends five college guys on a West Texas spree. Heaven Help Us has five Roman Catholic schoolboys getting cute in the confessional and decapitating a statue of their school's patron saint. Mischief pairs a wimp and a stud in the small-town '50s. In Tomboy, Betsy Russell is a Flashdance- style mechanic who goes stock-car racing. In Vision Quest, Rocky pins Flashdance on the high school wrestling mat. One can find vagrant felicities in these films: a snap to the style of Tuff Turf; the bang...
...format devised as an upshot of this bit of pop-psych market research pits He-Man's Heroic Warriors against the forces of evil every weekday on 166 television stations. In each half-hour segment, He-Man starts out as a mere wimp of a kid named Adam. When he raises his sword and utters the magic incantation, Adam turns into a hero who looks like Prince Valiant with Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique. Since the animated cartoon premiered 15 months ago, it has gained 9 million viewers, most of them boys ages four to seven...
...worry a second, Bart. Have I let you down these last three years? Did I play the wimp, while you took on the New Right, or what? 'Peddlers of coercion'-you really have a way with words...