Word: wording
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Because the same word means different things to each side, agreement can be more apparent than real. Both sides talk about a "neutral" South Viet Nam, for instance. To the Communists, this may mean the exclusion from government of any element that fought them. "Democracy" has different definitions for Asians and Americans, for Communists and nonCommunists...
...read with great interest your recent editorial on the steady erosion of the forcefulness of the word, 'fuck.' Realizing the need for an obscenity to supplant this fading epithet, we enlisted the aid of an Applied Mathematics section man to program the Harvard computer to run through the list of four-letter combinations (there are 26 to the fourth power equals 456,976 of them, if you ignore the necessity of vowels, etc.) in an effort to pick out the ten filthiest words in the English tongue. The word at the head of the list is so unbelievably obscene...
...problem basically seemed to be a lack of inspiration. Anyone who ever watched the team run its token lap before practice knows this. With the exception of a precious few, the squad crawls through this lap at minimum speed. It's a joke in every sense of the word. This was reflected in the games most of the time...
Kunen's wit captures this shapeless but intense anger very lucidly, and while his book is far from the last word on radicals, it is as sharp a statement of radical disgust with liberals as one can hope to find. With great glee, Kunen relates second-hand The Ad Hoc Faculty Sandwich Decision -- a scenario in which votes have been taken, dissident factions reconciled and the body has determined how it will mediate the battle between jocks blocking off the entrance to an occupied building and any protestors trying to pass in food. Kunen discovers the trouble with the liberals...
There is a certain savagery implicit in this word play with the rhetorical commonplaces of what President Nixon called the other night our most serious political problem. But part of Kunen's Statement seems to be that the Vietnam War is simply to grotesque to be taken seriously--it must be an outrageous hoax, perpetrated on everyone with sensibilities by some anonymous "Biggies." So it is also with the military-industrial complex, which Kunen can only talk about with the elaborate fantasy of "The Big Letter" which he expects may arrive any day -- "I wasn't sure what it would...