Word: suspect
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Archimedes tried to calculate how many grains of sand the universe could contain (1051, he said). Today, however, mind-walloping numbers are no longer oddities; they are the stuffing of ordinary news and public discourse. While even the biggest figures no doubt possess meaning, it is impossible not to suspect that many casually circulated numbers might as well be the music of the spheres...
Thou shalt, Writer Gay Talese earnestly hopes, covet Thy Neighbor's Wife. That's the title of the latest book by erstwhile New York Timesman Talese, 47, who spent eight intriguing and, some suspect, interminable years in bedrooms, board rooms, massage parlors, even on a free-love farm, researching the changing sexual mores of middle-class America. The conclusions are so enticing that the book, with the publication date still six months away, already has earned nearly $4 million, including a $2.5 million film-rights agreement last week. Now that the sex epic has climaxed, Talese wants...
...cold day before West Point bestowed its prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award on a woman. Well it snowed, in early October on the Plain last week, and there stood Clare Boothe Luce, 76, accepting that award from General Andrew Goodpaster for her accomplishments in politics, diplomacy and the arts. "I suspect," said Luce, "that the fact that this is the first year that there are women in all four classes [at the Point] is not unrelated to my good fortune." Luce accepted an engraved saber from ranking cadet Vincent K. Brooks, 20. Brooks is the first black cadet ever to wear...
Geoffrey did not ask where the money came from, as he did not pry into his father's suspect background. The stakes were too high. As a child he based his own legitimacy on his father's identity; if his father did not exist, neither did he. So, he blindly trotted off to Harvard-Yale games with father, who rooted passionately, "as though he had a stake in its outcome." Duke even went so far as to buy English bulldogs to suggest his connection with Old Eli. Despite gaping holes in the Ivy League story--a friend once hailed Duke...
There is something inherently suspect about institutionalizing something as spontaneous as humor, and something even obscene in making it a sullen competition for yuks, as the Lampoon has done. The resultant brand of humor, inevitably perhaps, irritates--no, it offends. And by this I don't mean to carp on racism and sexism, although I think these elements are well in evidence in On the Lam. Rather, I mean the sort of comedy that points down, from an affected stance of intellectual or cultural superiority, lacking any sort of humanism or fellow feeling, without any hint that the Lampoon itself...