Word: withers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...increase in terrorism because when the Marxists find that they have lost out, I think they'll try to vent their spleen on everything in sight. Our assessment is, however, that once the agreement is made, there will be a gradual winding down and that in time terrorism will wither away. We are ready for an intensified war because it is always a possibility. If it does intensify, it will not take us by surprise...
Still, at year's end, neither wordsmiths nor comedians have the power of the people. Some of the favorite phrases of 1977 will make it to the lexicons; most will wither before the new year ends. Pessimists have a point when they refer to the new excrescences of television ego-talk. But optimists are not wrong when they find clearer days on Capitol Hill and a tonic absence of Viet Nam euphemisms and campus-v.-cops rhetoric. "Things are improving," says TV Pundit Edwin Newman (A Civil Tongue): "Schools are finally doing what they ought to do, teaching...
...writhed/ under the crunch of bloodstained boots,/ under the wheels of Black Marias." Life under Lenin's current successor has relaxed, grown somewhat less bleak, but there still seems no prospect that the mythology will be fulfilled: that, in the fullness of time, the state will begin to wither away and leave only the classless, abundant workers' paradise. On the contrary, the stolid bureaucracy expands, reduplicating itself and its controls. The Revolution's promises seem doomed always to recede into the future...
...easy courses proliferate, classes in the harder subjects wither away. Calculus and Russian, two post-Sputnik specialties, are extinct. Only 35 students are braving physics this year. Few kids prefer the nononsense, four-year algebra-geometry-algebra-trigonometry sequence to the simpler math courses. The attrition rate in foreign languages is so great that after the first year, students in higher courses are combined in one class. High-ability kids are not taking high-level courses," says Accounting Teacher James Whitty. The students ask: Why should we?" The school's course brochure advises college-preparatory students that they "should make...
...Gorky, Soviet Christians cry out for more churches Marxism may teach that religion must wither away, but the state is forever trying to help the process along. Though the new constitution, like the old, "recognizes" religious liberty in the U.S.S.R., the government decides exactly how many churches can stay open. Today there are only 7,500 Russian Orthodox churches, a tenth as many as before the 1917 Revolution, and 1,000 of these are not, in fact, in operation...