Word: worded
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...which freedom of expression has been put; they confront a physical violence and spiritual heedlessness that makes them wonder if the entire society is on a steep and terminal incline downward. They see around them what they call decadence. But is the U.S. decadent? Does the rich, evil word, with its little horripilations of pleasure, and its gonging of the last dance, really have any relevant meaning...
...argues that Americans overuse the word decadent, without knowing what they mean by it. They use it to describe a $50 bottle of Margaux, a three-hour soak in the tub, a 40-hour-a-week television habit, the crowds that tell the suicide to jump, a snort of cocaine. And yet Americans mean something by it. The notion of decadence is a vehicle that carries all kinds of strange and overripe cargo-but a confusing variety of meanings does not add up to meaninglessness. Decadence, like pornography (both have something of the same fragrance), may be hard to define...
...leap of civilization as the Renaissance. Ultimately, the process of decadence remains a mystery: Why has the tribe of Jews endured for so many centuries after the sophisticated culture of the Hittites disappeared? Richard Gilman can be granted his central point: "that 'decadence' is an unstable word and concept whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social, and cultural attitudes, and even technology." But the protean term is still tempting. It seems the one word that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when...
...word decadence, like an iridescent bubble, can be blown too large; it will burst with too much inflation of significance. In any case, decadence is too much a word of simplification. The U.S. is too complicated, housing too many simultaneous realities, to be covered with one such concept. Sub cultures of decadence exist, as they have in all societies. The amplifications of the press and television may make the decadence seem more sensational and pervasive than it really...
...caused by a sense of impermanence. The nation's creative forces, however, remain remarkably strong - in the sciences, for example, where achievements in physics, mathematics, biology and medicine rank beside anything so far accomplished on the planet. Before anyone tries to use too seriously the awful and thrilling word decadence, he ought to distinguish between the customary mess of life and the terminal wreckage of death...