Word: abstract
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...already there. This deepfreeze technique gives the students the impression that there really are no new questions . . . Instead of making the disciplines an intellectual encounter with the real as it swims into our experience, [Catholic teachers] prefer to petrify it by reducing it to a logical scheme of abstract verbalisms...
...says: "The inhabitants of Annotsfield . . . are often supposed by those outside the town to be complete materialists, narrow-minded, uncultured, coarse, interested only in cloth, 'brass' [i.e., money] and possibly football. That this is a mistake, that they are capable of violent and protracted passion for an abstract idea, is sufficiently proved, I think, by the events above recorded...
...opinion pointed to the 1949 jury instructions of Judge Harold Medina in the landmark trial in New York of Communist Party Secretary Eugene Dennis and ten other top U.S. Reds. The Medina instructions, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1951, said that the Smith Act denounced not the "abstract doctrine" of violent overthrow but the "teaching and advocacy of action" in "language reasonably and ordinarily calculated to incite persons to such action." Apparently, to the Supreme Court's mind, the key phrase was "incite to action"-and Judge Mathes had failed...
Concern for Leftists. The court virtually invited journalistic fulminations with its Watkins-case decision, curbing the investigatory powers of Congress, and its Smith Act ruling that it is not illegal to advocate overthrow of the U.S. Government as "an abstract principle divorced from any effort to instigate action to that end." Some of the loudest outcries came from newspapers that had championed McCarthy; they ranged from the Omaha World-Herald's gibe that it is now "all right to teach that the White House should be blown up," to the Cleveland Plain Dealer's invitation: "Well, comrades...
...opera at all. But Paris' Le Monde called it a miracle. The Neue Züricher Zeitung found the score "an ingenious summary of all that makes Schoenberg the founder of a new musical language." That language-like the words of Schoenberg's Moses-was abstract, sometimes difficult to bear, but never to be ignored...