Word: procrustean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...member of OuLiPo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). The authors and scientists who constituted this informal group had a common goal: the discovery of new or fiendishly difficult and complex ways of arranging words in sequence. When it came to setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised a 5,000-letter statement that read the same backward and forward. Its subject: palindromes...
That psychic procrustean bed is being splintered by Ferraro's campaign. The next woman to run for Vice President will not need to achieve perfect self-modulation. Nor will a male candidate again take the liberty, as George Bush did, of making lame jokes about the World Series when given the chance to ask a question of his female opponent. Lee Csanad, a typographer, said indignantly, "Bush certainly underscored the fact that to this Administration our opinion has never mattered." The Bush campaign's post-debate donning of the manly trappings of the locker room-from gleeful references...
...every Chinese knows that without Chairman Mao there would be no new China." At the same time, he has not restrained the official press from indicting the shaping hand of Chinese Communism for "subjectivity, one-sidedness, hauteur and lack of humility." Most cunning of all, Deng has stretched the procrustean bed of Maoism to fit his own needs. By adapting such Maoist phrases as "seeking truth from facts" and "the mass line" to his own purposes, he has given the impression that he has been more faithful to "the thought of Mao" than the Great Helmsman himself...