Word: worded
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...heels" echoed by "free"; the alliteration of "fettered ... fist ? free"; the combination of all three effects in the verse-ending stressed monosyllable "free," so ironically spoken by a blind slave in chains, but also so irresistibly open-voweled, defiant and exhilarating. In some ways, "free" is the single word that sums up what's most appealing about Milton's politics - his resistance to tyranny, his commitment to liberty. But of course the whole sentence is a threat to beat up someone who disagrees with him - in particular, someone who refuses to acknowledge his God-guaranteed superiority over everyone else...
...framed photograph of junta leader Than Shwe, which normally hung at the front of the classroom. I asked if the 75-year-old strongman was a good person. The teacher laughed: "No, very bad." So why had he saved the picture? The teacher struggled for the right English word. "Scared," he said. Then he brought his wrists together to mime handcuffs...
...sure, but with a conviction that the most direct route into the heart of things was by way of what were supposed to be the margins. He liked to be anyplace he could find people who were forlorn, pensive, manic or needy. Exaltation attracted him too. What other word to apply to the mood of that intense man in white praying at the water's edge in Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana? And everywhere, he paused in wonder at big, glowing jukeboxes dispensing their industrial light and magic into the darkness...
Clinton also removed the word welfare from America's political lexicon. In the mid-1980s, when pollsters conducted focus groups with Reagan Democrats, they found that when they talked about government help for the needy, voters saw it as welfare: taking money from whites to give to undeserving blacks. That attitude was hugely unfair, but it was a political reality. Clinton changed that when he reformed welfare in 1996. By making it brutally clear that people who didn't work wouldn't get much help from Washington, he made it harder for Republicans to tag Democratic antipoverty programs as handouts...
...above Rattlesnake Lake in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, John McCain is describing the chasm that separates him from George W. Bush on global warming. "The President and I have disagreed on this issue for many years," he says, glancing right and left in search of the most expressive word he can find. "There's a longstanding... significant... deep... and strong difference on this issue...