Word: wording
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...political temperament. In an effort to discourage the violence that customarily erupts at election time, mothers and priests stood guard at many of the polling places, and liquor sales were forbidden for a week beforehand. Even so, rival private armies, which Filipinos call "goonstabularies" in a play on the word constabulary, prowled the country. A number of intimidated election officials resigned or disappeared, and about 50 people died in shootouts...
...administration building for seven hours to protest the school's failure to abolish ROTC. The students used lead pipes and buckets of hot water to repulse unarmed campus guards but fled when city police arrived. They left behind ransacked offices and a white bed sheet with the word revolution scrawled across it in red. Six students were arrested, and at least six campus guards were injured, one seriously...
That peremptory statement is the introduction to one of the year's most intriguing books, a $4 quarto-sized paperback that, mainly by word of mouth, has become an underground bestseller...
...like the gallused boors he despised, chewed cigars like a Tammany clubhouse character and had tastes that ran to beer and bawdy jokes, was ever regarded as the epitome of metropolitan sophistication. The term smart set, which was the title of his first magazine, seems sadly unsmart today. The word sophisticated now applies mainly to weaponry and (in Italy) to synthetic wine. Those whom Mencken called "sinhounds," "bluenoses" and "wowsers" are virtually extinct, and Mencken lies amid their megatherian bones...
...most enlightened man writing today." That praise now seems a shade inconsequential-as if a potentially great pianist had squandered his digital gifts as a pinball virtuoso. In truth, Mencken worked hard at his prose but had the autodidact's fatal fondness for the fancy word. As for the flowers of wit culled by Carl Bode, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, they have wilted badly. Intended to shock rather than illuminate, the once celebrated epigrams shock no more. The examples quoted, such as, "Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another," yearn...