Word: absorber
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like Hemingway's Nick Adams, Irving began wandering in quest of experience-"to taste life," he said, "to search for the basic truths." First he went to Detroit to work in a machine shop and absorb the life of the working class. For a time he was a Fuller Brush man in Syracuse. Then he went to Europe, where he finished On a Darkling Plain, a novel in which three college buddies encounter the disillusionments of the postwar world. On the dust jacket, the publisher offered an "unqualified guarantee of reader satisfaction" or the book could be exchanged...
...What the pros are looking for in their "dream quarterback" is aptly described by Minnesota Viking General Manager Jim Finks: "The future star quarterback will have the qualities of a single-wing tailback. He will have the size to see over and around big onrushing linemen, good strength to absorb the punishment, and speed to run past the defensive linemen and linebackers...
...idea of "benign neglect": the complacent conviction that Americans could continue pouring out their overvalued dollars, buying as many foreign goods and factories as they chose and spending on military ventures as lavishly as they pleased. The rest of the world, so the theory went, had to absorb all the dollars because the dollar was as good as gold. It had an "immutable" value in terms of gold, and the U.S. was pledged to sell American gold-at the rate of $35 an ounce-in exchange for dollars that foreigners wished to cash in. But as foreigners piled up almost...
...adequacy is not related to intelligence but more importantly to personality traits like docility, relation to authority, subordinancy, and lack of creativity. Gintis's studies show that schools discriminate in favor of those with high I.Q.'s and that the more school one completes, the more one will absorb these personality traits which determine job status. But Gintis warns that I.Q. tells us little that is not already known: as a predictor "social class, independent of I.Q., is a much better determinant of educational and occupational attainment...
...Connor's world, shrewdness does not count, nor do other traditional virtues such as thrift or planning ahead. The Displaced Person is a complex and appalling tragedy in which country people who think of themselves as hardy "survivors," destroy their own world rather than absorb a Polish refugee who is himself simply trying to survive. Few writers mix comedy and cruelty more offhandedly or more effectively. Witness a redneck farmhand's wife contemplating the Polish family's broken English: "They can't talk. You reckon they'll know what colors even is?" As her hostile...