Word: 17th
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...economic problems. Many of its shortcomings are side effects of the same qualities that have helped it to achieve so much. The sense of national unity and consensus has resulted in a society that tends to reject anyone who is different. One example: the burakumin-descendants of pre-17th century social outcasts, are still not considered full members of society. Some 600,000 Koreans, many of whose families have lived in Japan for generations, are likewise not integrated into the mainstream of Japanese life...
...disorder." Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Spiro Agnew, Gerald Ford, all made terrible gaffes, with Ford perhaps making the most unusual ("Whenever I can I always watch the Detroit Tigers on radio"). Yet this is no modern phenomenon. The term faux pas goes back at least as far as the 17th century, having originally referred to a woman's lapse from virtue. Not that women lapse more than men in this regard. Even Marie Antoinette's fatal remark about cake and the public, if true, was due to a poor translation...
...other side of Las Ramblas, the barrio gotico calls to mind the Spain of the 16th and 17th centuries. Townhouses crowd each other along narrow alleys, interspersed with shops and restaurants. The juxtaposition of Barcelona's modern port with the markets and neighborhood immediately surrounding Las Ramblas exemplifies the coexistence of history and modernization...
...result: "The idea of an immortal soul, the seat of individuality, which had long been cultivated in the world of clergymen, gradually spread, from the 11th to the 17th century, until eventually it gained almost universal acceptance. This new eschatology caused the word death to be replaced by trite circumlocutions such as 'he gave up the ghost' or 'God has his soul...
...story is one of decline, fall and trivialization. Through slow and elaborate psychological artifice, death loses respect. The rise of science and rationalism in the 17th and 18th centuries disrupted the traditional divine order and laid the basis for Model 3: "remote and imminent death." This is a bold construct in which the beliefs and rituals curbing natural behavior were breached. Sex and death, two of nature's most powerful expressions, were confused; the macabre became eroticized. Ariès illustrates this slippery thesis with Sade's tales of necrophilia...