Word: verb phrase
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...White House as a speechwriter, before starting a career as a wordsmith at the Times. And a wordsmith he was: in addition to his columns, Safire also penned (a verb I suspect he would have hated) the On Language page in the New York Times Magazine, continuing to write it until shortly before he died. For those of us who love to know where a word or phrase comes from, how its meaning and usage has changed and what verbal construction is now permissible (and what is not), On Language was a consistent delight. (See pictures of Republican memorabilia...
...female-sexed biological body; rather, a person becomes a “woman” through assimilation into a socially constructed category defined in opposition to “man.” Yet the ambiguity of the verb “becoming” invites both passive and active interpretations of Beauvior’s concept. Passively construed, the phrase contends that a person is made into a woman by social forces beyond her control; coerced into compliance with norms of femininity that she has not chosen, a woman, in expressing her sexuality, is merely reifying the oppressive social...
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart: it demands ellipses, or at the very least, abbreviation. The Pains, TPOBPAH, perhaps PBPH, or, as their label Slumberland Records prefers, POBPAH. One verb short of a clause, it is arguably the most misguided decision in band-naming since the exclamation point in...
Swift-boat is shorthand for the brilliant, despicable Republican campaign strategy in 2004 that turned John Kerry's honorable service in Vietnam into a negative factor in his campaign. The phrase has become more broadly the term for a particular category of campaign tactics and has even become a verb. To "swift-boat" somebody is to use these tactics against him or her. If you remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign and don't see anything wrong with it--or if you believe it was the work of "independent" operatives unconnected to George W. Bush's campaign...
...jubilee.” If this is true, these critics only have succeeded in crafting a grammatically correct, but awkward sentence as they change “throng” from a verb to a noun. I am not exactly sure what a “jubilee throng” is, jubilee being the adjective apparently, but I am sure they can convolute some meaning into the phrase if they needed to try that hard...