Desperate for a permissiveness fix, I turned to Dr. Roundheels himself, E. Ward Gilman, in Merriam-Webster's indispensable Dictionary of English Usage.
This was in the early seventies, an era of supposedly reckless permissiveness, and yet I addressed my creative-writing teachers as "Mr".
A prince noted for the permissiveness of his private life, Louis I's prodigality was notorious.
This is what I have called "coercive permissiveness": members of the public could modify their own habits and lifestyle to gain better health, but increasingly that modifcation was state ordained and supported.
Former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir, writing for Time magazine, says there currently exists "an atmosphere of permissiveness and anti-police rhetoric unlike any that I have seen in 45 years in law enforcement".
"All through the 1990s," Friedman began, "I became increasingly concerned about the permissiveness of the Supreme Court toward policing and what it was doing in the middle of the War on Drugs, the toll on people's lives, the toll on liberties".
My permissiveness has raised some eyebrows among friends and colleagues, and I am not necessarily holding myself up as a role model.
The study found internalizing disorders in girls and externalizing disorders in boys (i.e. stereotype congruent misbehaviour) to be associated with permissiveness.
The term I've personally used for this new culture of "permissiveness" is "the green light".
It's extraordinary," Kyle Volcano, a professional glassblower from Eugene, Oregon, told me when I asked what he thought of the government's newfound permissiveness toward herb.
I dared not pose the question, since what I loved at the Pifers' was precisely the unspoken air of permissiveness, of fluidity, and a dull call for definition would have killed it.
