Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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EVEN at Harvard traditions must be run over by the wheels of progress. The recent decision to ban beer kegs from Freshman dorms shows that University officials recognize this need for change. Such ancient undergraduate rites of passage as playing Donkey Kong by rolling empty kegs down the stairs of Weld Hall or maneuvering through 30 people crammed into a Holworthy bathroom around the keg in the shower will not be remembered, let alone missed by future Harvard students...
THEY both have their roots in the dim past of semi-barbarous ancient Greece. Both come around every four years in this part of the world. And both are regularly the focus of outlandish media hype...
...international Olympics and the primitive direct democracy that would later inspire the American political process were relatively undeveloped forms. Neither synchronized swimming nor the advanced telecommunications equipment necessary to broadcast it around the world had been invented during the Golden Age of Athens, for example. Nor did the ancient Greeks have the advantage of televised minidebates. They were a primitive and unhappy people indeed...
...reduction in the rate on capital gains -- the five-year economic boom, the resurgence of patriotism. Then the President also planned an ode to the Nicaraguan "freedom fighters." And of course there was a section of budget-deficit blues, a put- the-blame-on-Congress thumper ending with that ancient standard: the call for a line-item veto...
...14th chronicle of Brother Cadfael, a resolutely logical monk who is a 12th century forerunner of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown, in The Hermit of Eyton Forest (Mysterious Press; 224 pages; $15.95). Peters' narratives suffer from cuteness and rarely make medieval people come alive as convincingly as, say, the ancient Greeks and Persians in the novels of Mary Renault. But she weaves a plot ably and is extremely effective at dividing the world into good guys and bad guys and working up the reader's rooting interest...