Examples in Frank Trippett"s "Loaded Words"
Reporter and editor Frank Trippett was for many years a senior writer and essayist for Time magazine. In the essay "Watching Out for Loaded Words," which first appeared in Time in May 1982, Trippett examines words that carry "a load of judgment or bias that plays upon the emotions instead of lighting up the understanding." In the following paragraph, he offers several examples of such "loaded words"--without once using the word "example."
by Frank Trippett (1926-1998)
Words can be impregnated with feeling by oversimplification. People who oppose all abortions distort the position of those favoring freedom of private choice by calling them proabortion. And many a progressive or idealist has experienced the perplexity of defending himself against one of the most peculiar of all disparaging terms, do-gooder. By usage in special contexts, the most improbable words can be infused with extraneous meaning. To speak of the "truly needy" as the Administration habitually does is gradually to plant the notion that the unmodified needy are falsely so. Movie Critic Vincent Canby has noticed that the word film has become imbued with a good deal of snootiness that is not to be found in the word movie. Moderate is highly susceptible to coloring in many different ways, always by the fervid partisans of some cause: Adlai Stevenson, once accused of being too moderate on civil rights, wondered whether anyone wished him to be, instead, immoderate.
* "Watching Out for Loaded Words," by Frank Trippett, was first published in Time magazine, May 24, 1982.
from "Watching Out for Loaded Words"*
by Frank Trippett (1926-1998)
Words can be impregnated with feeling by oversimplification. People who oppose all abortions distort the position of those favoring freedom of private choice by calling them proabortion. And many a progressive or idealist has experienced the perplexity of defending himself against one of the most peculiar of all disparaging terms, do-gooder. By usage in special contexts, the most improbable words can be infused with extraneous meaning. To speak of the "truly needy" as the Administration habitually does is gradually to plant the notion that the unmodified needy are falsely so. Movie Critic Vincent Canby has noticed that the word film has become imbued with a good deal of snootiness that is not to be found in the word movie. Moderate is highly susceptible to coloring in many different ways, always by the fervid partisans of some cause: Adlai Stevenson, once accused of being too moderate on civil rights, wondered whether anyone wished him to be, instead, immoderate.
* "Watching Out for Loaded Words," by Frank Trippett, was first published in Time magazine, May 24, 1982.
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