Word: wording
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...much for the referential use of language. Against it in those days we set up a thing called the emotive use of language. (We inherited the word "emotive;" I think it was Marty who launched it.) What we tried to say has often been misunderstood. . . . The referential use of language is the job of leading people to think about certain things--about this rather than about that--and to think in this sort of way rather than in that way. Reference is your main instrument for influencing people. You can also do it other ways...
SOMEWHAT to our surprise, we began to realize early in our deliberations that the gravest current problem in the Graduate School is the one summarized by the well-worn but convenient word "morale." A distressingly large number of graduate students find their experience at Harvard disappointing. They have little sense of belonging to a fellowship, and they keenly miss the enrichments and gratifications that consociation might offer. Their range of relationships with each other is, they believe, much too limited. But it also troubles them that their relationships to the faculty, their department, and the University are tenuous, ambiguous...
Dashes, asterisks and euphemisms are still the way out chosen by most editors. But "if the image of the word is already formed in the mind of the reader," says John Seigenthaler, editor of the Nashville Tennessean, "you might as well use the word. We have the responsibility of getting over to the reader exactly what was said. We should say what we have to say in this society and say it accurately...
...Esquire, which published Norman Mailer's scatological novel An American Dream five years ago (but asked Novelist Bernard Malamud last fall to change two obscene phrases in a short story; he refused, and the Atlantic printed the story and the two phrases). "We're using four-letter words less and less just because they've surfaced," says Editor Harold Hayes. "They're losing their force." This spring he plans to publish an article on that subject entitled, appropriately, "- Is No Longer a Dirty Word...
Inevitably, "conglomerate" has become something of a dirty word in business, bringing back memories of old-time industrial trusts, interlocking directorates and utilities pyramids that collapsed disastrously. Even most leaders of conglomerate companies loathe the name, largely because they are vocally critical of each other and do not like to be lumped together with some of the abrasive men and controversial companies involved in modern mergers. They prefer to be known as leaders of "multi-industry" or "multimarket" concerns. Yet "conglomerate" seems an apt title. Derived from the Latin verb, conglomerare, meaning "to roll together," it is also the geological...