Word: everydayness
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...pleasant term for a blunt one-telling it like it isn't. Euphemism has probably existed since the beginning of language. As long as there have been things of which men thought the less said the better, there have been better ways of saying less. In everyday conversation the euphemism is, at worst, a necessary evil; at its best, it is a handy verbal tool to avoid making enemies needlessly, or shocking friends. Language purists and the blunt-spoken may wince when a young woman at a party coyly asks for directions to "the powder room," but to most...
There is little if any hope that euphemisms will ever be excised from mankind's endless struggle with words that, as T. S. Eliot lamented, bend, break and crack under pressure. For one thing, certain kinds of everyday euphemisms have proved their psychological necessity. The uncertain morale of an awkward teen-ager may be momentarily buoyed if he thinks of himself as being afflicted by facial "blemishes" rather than "pimples." The label "For motion discomfort" that airlines place on paper containers undoubtedly helps the squeamish passenger keep control of his stomach in bumpy weather better than if they were...
...everyday life, there is hardly a sign of outright Israeli repression. The administrative and military posture of the occupiers is low; West Bank Governor Brigadier General Raphael Vardi, who controls some 600,000 Palestinian Arabs, does his job with a lean staff of no more than 300 Israelis. TIME Correspondent Jim Bell cabled last week after a five-day tour of the West Bank: "The Israelis you saw were in the occasional infantry squad, their combat fatigues wet with sweat, walking along a road or eating rations under a gnarled olive tree. Occasionally others raced by in Jeeps and weapons...
...observed. Eakins plainly was not inhibited, even by men of the cloth, in his relentless pursuit of pictorial truth. Though his portrayals are sympathetic, he uncovered strain, doubt, fear, pettiness and self-pity -qualities that belied the traditional view of the priesthood as a calling above and apart from everyday frustrations...
...MAYSLES brothers have thus picked up the cudgel in that tired old liberal crusade against the commercialization of religion. Implications might be drawn, weighty ones, about the nature of a commence-ransacked religion; about the everyday violence perpetrated by modern-day moneychangers of the cloth, about a ruling class' interest in the institutionalization of ecstasy through church structure. But the direct cinema aesthetic, in this case dedicated to just being there while a Bible salesman goes under, doesn't permit them. In its exposure of contradictions Salesman is a one-joke film; in intellectual content in never rises above Ferlinghetti...