Word: worded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ACCORDING to his widow, who prepared this volume, Italo Calvino considered many options for the title of this collection before he hit on the word "memos." For an American, the word has unpleasant associations--the torpid prose of bureaucrats and administrators, whose spell-check word processors restrict their vocabularies--but one can see how it would appeal to a European intellectual like Calvino. It has a soothing alliteration, and its etymology--an abbreviation of "memorandum," something "to be remembered"--implies history...
Nonetheless, a memo aspires to usefulness, not nostalgia--witness that the last two syllables of the word have been dropped for the sake of economy and utility. The memo transmits to the future only as much of the past as will serve, and the future will forget the memo as it builds upon...
Once the Dins had promoted the idea, by postering and word-of-mouth, Piedmont actually offered to donate a few round-trip tickets and t-shirts to the cause. But self-styled Stuff Manager Bruce Condit and the others decided that "crap for everyone was better than a few good doorprizes...
...WORTH considering how Kilson's academy looks up close. Consider what happened last semester when students adopted Kilson's tactics, coming up with their own code-word for racism--"racially insensitive"--and used it in pitting themselves against the Winthrop Professor of History, Stephan Thernstrom. The students, who brought their complaint before a College committee, objected to remarks Thernstrom made in Historical Studies A-25: "The Peopling of America," including characterizations of Jim Crow laws as beneficial to Blacks in diffusing white antagonism...
Like so many New Englanders, Harvard women's water polo Coach Chris Hafferty has trouble saying the letter "r" ("I pahked my cah"). So whenever he says the word "rookie," it comes out "wookie...