Word: abstractly
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...what may seem clear cut in the abstract can become more complicated in real life. For instance, what exactly is infidelity? This is a question that in slightly different form--How does one define "sexual relations"?--continues to dog the President. According to the TIME/CNN poll, 95% of Americans, which is about as unanimous as we ever get, agree that "having sex with a prostitute" counts. On the other end of the survey's scale is "casually flirting with someone else," considered adulterous by a (hard to live with?) minority of 35%. Somewhere in the middle are "having a sexually...
...strayed; 60% say they know at least one wife who has been unfaithful. Of those respondents, 62% said they "thought less" of the adulterous husbands, while 56% "thought less" of the adulterous wives. These numbers are significantly lower than the previously cited condemnations of adultery in the abstract, suggesting that Americans tend to follow the dictum of hating the sin, not the sinner...
...understand, at least formally, that what they were doing was wrong. That's what the placement of Bulger's body on the tracks suggests; and the prosecutor of the six-year-old says three doctors concluded that the boy was able to discern right from wrong in the abstract. Similarly, in 1989, after nine-year-old Cameron Kocher shot Jessica Carr, age 7, with a rifle after an argument over Nintendo in their hometown in northeast Pennsylvania, the boy hid the spent cartridge. And after Robert ("Yummy") Sandifer, 11, killed a 14-year-old girl in Chicago in the late...
...replacing it with a tortured definition of sex to help explain his earlier claims of innocence. Even if he said he did it to spare his family, the support he enjoys among a majority of Americans would sink like a stone. It's one thing to have an abstract notion that he actually had an affair and covered it up (and to have that leak from Starr's grand jury). It's another to hear it from his own mouth, to have the fig leaf of doubt removed and be forced to confront our own moral laxity in being willing...
...adopted the plotless style of Balanchine, his mentor and idol, firmly denying that his new works were "about" anything but movement and music. Dancegoers knew better. Dances at a Gathering may not have a plot, but it is full of vividly drawn characters who relate to one another in abstract yet deeply emotional ways...