A Few Sample Lists

1. The words tumbled out in a bracing, breathless aria of insults: "The
Waffle Man, moving away from it all."  "Governor Taxes and the Ozone
Man."  "Governor Clinton, over the last 24 hours has been frantically
flopping around like a bass on the side of the Arkansas River."  "He smokes
a little but he didn't inhale.  Sure.  Who believes that?"  "A couple of
yuppies dressed as moderates--watch your wallet."  "Tell all those
Washington--those kind of salon leaders."  "These deadly talking heads." 
"When these instant replay guys come on the television, it doesn't matter
what they say."
     While Barbara Bush was on the train, Mr. Bush tried to exercise some
restraint.  But as soon as she dropped off at dusk, the President began
calling people "bozos" again.
     "A new Congress is coming in," he told the crowd at his last stop in
Chippewa Falls, his voice cracking as the words cascaded faster than ever,
"so a lot of these bozos are going to be gone--excuse the expression."
     Racing to finish, Mr. Bush truncated his litany of complaints about Bill
Clinton's record in Arkansas and simply barked, "And on and on and on."
[Maureen Dowd, "On the Trail, the Contradictory Sides of Bush,"
The New York Times November 2, 1992, A1, A10.]

2. Most countries have some particular combination of climate and soil that
encourages a certain plant to flourish and win the attention of the perfume
trade's raw-material buyers.  Go to Guatemala for fine lemon grass, to the
Comoros Islands for the spicy flowers of the graceful ylang-ylang tree, to
Malaysia or Sumatra for the exotic herb patchouli; go to Finland for pine
resins, to Yugoslavia for oakmoss, to China for eucalyptus, to India for
ginger and sandalwood, to Madagascar for vanilla.  The United States
contributes lemons and oranges from California and Florida, peppermint
from the Pacific Northwest and clary sage from North Carolina.  [Timothy
Green, "Making Scents is More Complicated than You'd Think,"
Smithsonian, June 1991, p. 56]


3. Some of Mervin's most vocal support was judged to be based on a fear of
drugs ("Drugs have become such a fearful thing people want to stop the
problem and they don't care how," Devere Ponzo, head of the Chester
County Black Action Committee, has said.  "If a couple of people get killed-
-tough"); some of it may have come from political considerations (it was
thought that raising questions might have been insulting not only to the
chief of police but to the Republican establishment that supported him);
some of it was undoubtedly a matter of ideology (one group that backed the
John A. Mervin Defense Fund--the Association of Alert Citizens, a group
that grew out of an anti-sex-education organization called Taxpayers for
Decency--based its support partly on the ground that, in the words of one of
its spokesmen, "we support the police--period").  But a lot of the talk about
the Mervin case in West Chester emphasizes, aside from any political or
ideological or anti-drug feeling, how much people want to believe in John
Mervin.  [Calvin Trillin, "I've Always Been Clean" Killings, 24]


4. Several observations are suggested by the three depictions of self and
enemy summarized above.  Know Your Enemy--Japan, for example, serves to
remind us of how much both the professional and popular mind was shaped
then as now by quick, disjointed images and impressions--by headlines,
photographs, newsclips, and cartoons; by "symbolic" items and events such as
cinema samurai, Hideyoshi's ear mound, the Tanaka Memorial and the
Rape of Nanking, Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March; by catch-
phrases ("divine emperor," "world conquest," "kamikaze"); by sweeping racial
clich‚s ("regimented," "treacherous," "fanatic," "bestial").  In much the same
way, the Japanese saw the Anglo-American enemy at least in part through
the prism of the cinema (including gangster and Wild West movies); through
the stereotyped person of the arrogant white colonial with his luxurious
house on the hill, and the galling memory of symbolic acts of racial
discrimination such as those that occurred at the fledgling League of
Nations in 1919 and in the United States in 1924; through such catch-
phrases as "economic strangulation" and (everyone's favorite) "world
domination"; and through sweeping racial and cultural clich‚s such as
"materialistic," "egoistic," "selfish," and "exploitative."

[John Dower, War Without Mercy p. 28)


5. Certainly Cummings [e.e. cummings] taxes our forbearance.  I suspect that
many readers of the new edition will, as I did, fix upon some diverting pet
peeve in the hope that periodic annoyance will keep their energy from
flagging.  Lord knows there is a wide array of tics to choose from.  One
might focus on his bottomless appetite for "un" constructions (undeath,
unlife, unwisdom, unnoise, unsits, uneyes, unsmaller).  Or on his penchant
for cumbersome adverbs (relaxingly, sizelessly, floatingly, smoothloomingly). 
Or on his addiction to "illimitable" and "illimitably."  Or on his blithe
embrace of easy paradoxes ("exactitudes of imprecision," "depths of height,"
"mere eternity").  My own bugbear was his habit of applying the language of
punctilio to the nebulous or amorphous ("accurate strenuous lips of
incorruptible Nothing," "exact smile," "ladies accurately dead," "correct
fingers," "accurate boy mouth," "the accurate moon," "little accurate saints,"
"the accurate demure ferocious rhythm of precise laziness," "exact tombs,"
"to exactly kiss," "accurate gloom"). [Brad Leithauser, "Books: mr. lower
case," The New Yorker, February 3, 1992, p. 86.]


6. The Lord said: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with
outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they
go, tinkling with their feet; the Lord will afflict with scabs the heads of the
daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.  In that day
the Lord will take away the finery of the anklets, the headbands, and the
crescents; the pendants, the bracelets, and the scarfs; the headdresses, the
armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, and the amulets; the signet rings and
nose rings; the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags; the
garments of gauze, the linen garments, the turbans, and the veils.  Instead of
perfume there will be stench; and instead of a sash, a rope; and instead of
well-set hair, baldness; and instead of a rich robe, a binding of sackcloth;
instead of beauty, shame.  (Isaiah 3.16-24)


7.  The intimacy of violence stressed the immense differences between
Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.  It is the spear against the club, the jaguar
against the rhino, the bass drum against the flute, the bulldozer against the
motorcycle, the crash of cymbals against the mandolin's shuddering sounds,
Wagner's operas against the Strauss waltz, a switchblade against a ballbat,
thunder against lightning, the racing sloop against the tugboat, Mutt against
Jeff, the net against the butterfly, Milton Berle against Dick Cavett, the fox
against the hound. 
     Their race and trade are all they appear to have in common.  Ali is
tall, and Frazier is short.  Their bodies form their styles as fighters.  It is a
classic distinction, the boxer against the puncher, the nimble pug against the
plodder.  [Jimmy Cannon]


8. Editor Phillips, late editor, owner and publisher of the Emporia
Daily and Weekly Democrat, has left for parts unknown, probably to
the horror and consternation of the parts, and certainly for the general
betterment of this community.  Far be it from this paper to say aught that
would cast an unwarranted aspersion upon an earnest though unfortunate
gentleman.  It is not the purpose of the Gazette to be sensational nor to
exaggerate interesting facts.  But as a matter of news and stated in the
precise terms of scientific description, without coloring the statement by
loose vernacular, the simple, homely truth demands that it be said of Phillips
that he was, is and will be while he lives on this easy old earth, the most
picturesque, unique, original, shameless, deliberate, conscienceless, malicious
and indefatigable dead beat that ever pressed the sidewalk of Commercial
street with his velvety feline feet.  It is but just to him to add that he was
not a harsh and irascible man.  He did not exact tribute with either club or
gun or buzz saw.  He had the soft, self-deprecatory, insinuating voice of a
cooing dove; and he glided into his machinations with the gentle, noiseless,
hypnotic sinuosity of a rubber-tired rattlesnake.  He was as bland as a
sunrise and as deadly as a pestilence. [William Allen White, editorial in the
Emporia Gazette--1889]

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