Posts tagged as:

media

CAMPAIGN FATIGUE: growing tired of political campaigns

December 11, 2011

It’s just about now that staff members of a political candidate are beginning to experience serious campaign fatigue.   Sleep deprivation, poll anxiety, long days, short nights, constant noise, and who knows what else.  They all contribute to the phenomenon which leads to mistakes, blunders, and nasty exchanges bordering on near-firings. But campaign fatigue is not [...]

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ABSTRUSE: hard to understand

October 24, 2011

  An explanation that just doesn’t make things clear is said to be abstruse.  You’ve been there.  You ask someone a question about what something means, or how something works.  The answer you get leaves you in an even-more-confused state. It is very disconcerting to the person giving the explanation, because the answer is perfectly [...]

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COUNTER-CULTURE:

September 16, 2011

The late 60′s and early 70′s were my cultural puberty.   I was still quite fuzzy and I hadn’t yet developed my adult voice.  I was in the process of becoming culturally aware and my attempts at demonstrating it were fumbled and awkward. It was during that era that a phenomenon covered his country that has [...]

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BULLY PULPIT: a highly visible political position from which a person can present an opinion

August 17, 2011

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about the bully pulpit various candidates have from which they can profess their views. Not surprisingly, the term was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, for whom the term bully was a positive.  It meant strong, forceful, and aggressive, terms that would naturally apply to the [...]

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DEGAGE (de ga jhay’): detached, unconnected

July 26, 2011

When I first saw this word, degage, I thought to myself, “Oh, that’s interesting.  Must be the opposite of engage.” I was right about the meaning, but I was surprised when, later, I heard the word pronounced.  It isn’t “dee-gaj.”  It retains its French derivation and pronunciation and is pronounced as de – ga – [...]

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RUSH TO JUDGMENT: making a decision without taking time to check the facts properly

July 2, 2011

The scandal involving a high-level French political leader and a housekeeper in a high-end New York boutique hotel  has raised a plethora of issues over the past few weeks.   The prosecutor’s office in New York jumped on the case.  The media has been gleeful in reporting every jot and tittle of supposed information about the [...]

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CONSPIRACY: a secret plan or agreement to carry out an illegal or harmful act, esp with political motivation*

May 3, 2011

It’s already begun.  In today’s papers they are reporting that conspiracy groups have already begun in their attempt to deny the death of Osama bin Laden. It was predictable.   Nothing of significance happens in national or international news without some fruitcakes starting the chant that it didn’t really happen. The US never really landed on [...]

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OIL SPILL: a crisis no longer waiting to happen

April 30, 2010

The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its resulting crisis for the residents of the Gulf Coast is a wake-up call to those pressuring for off-shore drilling. If a similar crisis were to be occurring with a nuclear power plant there would be no excuses for a permanent moratorium on the building [...]

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BATHYMETRY: plumbing the depths to get to the bottom

February 13, 2010

I stumbled onto this word recently and found it interesting. The idea of mapping the bottom of a lake the size of one of the Great Lakes or the bottom of the ocean caught my imagination, so I investigated it further. There is amazing technology available these days to do this with great accuracy. My [...]

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KNEECAP: to undermine a person or injure a person's reputation in a particularly vicious manner. (www.WordSpy.com)

November 24, 2009

———- A new word usually emerges out of an attempt to describe an action or activity which is prominent in the minds of the public. Keyboarding, for instance, has replaced typing in our vocabulary as the use of computers has replaced the use of typewriters for the most part. To kneecap is one of those [...]

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