Word: button
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...LITTLE GIRL, maybe six or seven years old with straight brown hair and timid eyes, walks up to you as you get off the bus. "Buy a button? For the march?" she asks. You've travelled nine or ten hours in a miserable excuse for an economy bus to be able to march today. For a dollar, you can't refuse her. You buy the button, and allow the girl to pin it to your shirt. It reads. "Affirmative Action/Smash the Bakke Case." Welcome to the largest civil rights demonstration in 15 years...
From the subway they walk three blocks to the concrete high-rise that houses the clinic. A woman is being accosted by two strangers as she enters the building. "Don't kill your baby. Please don't kill your baby," says one of them, Miles Button, 43, a burly Long Island cabinetmaker and father of five. The woman brushes past him. "It's not easy work," sighs his companion, Anne Gilmartin, 44. "We're hitting them at a bad time, grabbing them at the last moment." Another woman angrily asks Button why he is there...
...such good deeds often go unnoticed. What works against lawyers generally is that they are at once indispensable and intimidating?a combination guaranteed to breed bitter resentment. "Lawyers have become secular priests," says Fred Button, a White House aide in the Kennedy Administration and now a successful Washington, D.C., attorney. They are, agrees Berkeley Law Dean Sanford Kadish, masters of "a mysterious art form to which the layman is not privy, with mumbo jumbo going on." The heart of the art, of course, is the impenetrable language that lawyers use, sometimes at great length (a direct outgrowth of the English...
Still, the mumbo jumbo can intimidate and irritate the layman. Further resentment stems from the ability of excellent lawyers to muddle and obfuscate. Says Button: "Lawyers are paid to complicate, to keep a dispute alive, to make everything technical." The Washington, D.C., firm of Covington & Burling, for example, once delayed for twelve years a Food and Brug Administration ruling on the labeling of peanut butter jars. Said one Covington lawyer: "Certainly, there's something suspicious about a 24,000-page hearing transcript and close to 75,000 pages of documents on a case involving peanut butter." As Humorist Art Buchwald...
They pushed the fool button...