Word: swiftness
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WORDS AND WOMEN by CASEY MILLER and KATE SWIFT 197 pages. Anchor Press/Doubleday...
Words and Women does not add much information to this familiar controversy. But it is the best brief summary of the whole question. Journalists Miller and Swift write as if their aim were to provoke thought, not outrage. Any language that insinuates a second-class status for women ought to be modified, they argue, if only for the sake of precision...
...view of this confusion, they ask, why not rely more often on terms like "human beings" or "people" when the aim is to include everyone? (If you kill a woman, the authors ask, should you really be charged with manslaughter? On the other hand, though Miller and Swift do not ask that the Classics be rewritten, might not Hamlet some day be forced to say "What a piece of work is people!") They predictably bridle at "he" or "his" used as pronouns when the sex of the antecedent is unspecified (everyone will get his comeuppance). The plural pronouns "they...
...always be that it is trudging along in the ranks of the Slick. Plumed cavaliers either joust each other or set up straw men, hollow men, graven images of themselves, to knock down. The magazine is covering a game of daggers sliding out of ruffled tuxedo sleeves, or a swift innuendo to the kidneys, or, at best, a Polaroid snapshot of stasis. They're all interesting, these conspiracies, but [MORE] has missed the Big One. There's no world-view here, and the rats are scuttling in the cellar and the ice cap melts. More is now less...
Striking Rojas in the abdomen, the .45-cal. slug shattered the spleen, then ripped through the diaphragm, punctured the left ventricle-the heart's major pumping chamber-and entered the aorta, the main artery of the body. Like a log in a swift stream, it was carried by the blood round the aorta's bend, down the chest into the left iliac, a major blood vessel feeding the leg, where it finally came to rest. Had the bullet taken a different course-blocking an artery to the head, say-Rojas would have died immediately...