Word: problems
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...significant intellectual growth. Well-intentioned, but insufficient. Henry Rosovsky has battled hard for the Core, and is justly proud of guiding it through a touchy Faculty, eager to protect its educational preserves. But he has spent a great deal of his political capital without addressing the root of the problem--he has brought the great Harvard minds before undergraduates, but failed to insure that they will teach any better. Of course, teaching cannot be legislated, and new courses can. It will take far more than a new curriculum to convince recalcitrant faculty members that undergraduates are worthy of their attention...
...Channing's Cambridge, people needed permission from their minister to believe that Harvard was not the center of the universe, Vonnegut said. "Some people still have that problem," he added...
Rotten writing is scarcely a new problem. Napoleon's script was so miserable that one of his generals once mistook a letter of his for battle orders. Charles Hamilton, a Manhattan dealer in autographs and manuscripts, contends that Writer Gertrude Stein's oblique prose style may be explained by the fact that compositors often misread her cryptic script. Poet William Butler Yeats often could not read his own work. Horace Greeley, the editor of the old New York Tribune, had a notoriously illegible scrawl. He once scribbled a note to a reporter telling him he was fired...
Everyone is against her. The men on the line are afraid that if she succeeds, other women will follow her and take their jobs. A supervisor hints delicately at the problem women have with "certain tensions at certain times." Other women attack her, and even her own daughter, embarrassed by taunts from the other kids, asks her to give up. Ellen persists, however, and Lavin makes the struggle of a simple woman more persuasive in its dramatic impact than a whole library of ideological tracts...
...that disco hit: YMCA ... YMCA... YMCA. The Unicorn Hunters, a society of zealous word watchers based at Lake Superior State College in Michigan, offer a list of current English scourges. Among them: "ballpark figure," "pre-boarding-how can you board a plane before you board it?" and "no problem." Even insult has lost its point: "I couldn't care less" has degenerated to the meaningless "I could care less." Greetings are equally vapid: telephone operators now routinely use '80s-babble, chirping, "Have a nice day," the moral equivalent of the smile button. Kramer vs. Kramer is advertised...