Word: anglo-saxon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lushness and artifice> Spanish precision and plainness have come through. Detail, passivity, indifference, a stoical acceptance of life, patience, an ironical resignation to the peculiar ways of human beings are its Spanish traits. Santayana's psychological powers are hardly less illuminating in his long essays on the Anglo-Saxon and the American characters; he had already lit up the follies of the German mind in his work on Egotism in German Philosophy, a work much consulted during the war against Hitler...
...vulgar snafu derivatives may have been American in origin . . . but acceptance and widespread dissemination of their useful addition to Anglo-Saxon idiom was peculiarly British and essentially Eighth Armyish. Your correct if prudish definition of snafu as "situation normal, all fouled up" is a reminder that there were exclusively British ascending and descending degrees of snafu. There was the "self-adjusting snafu" and the "non-self-adjusting snafu." And there was the climactic "cummfu," which, roughly translated, meant "complete utter monumental military foul...
...Latin, sex is an hors d'oeuvre; to the Anglo-Saxon, it is a barbecue...
Author Clark includes a good many descriptions of Roman churches ("It is all physical and close; God is not up in any Gothic shadows . . . The Anglo-Saxon, hunting everywhere for French cathedrals, feels his mind threatened like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea"). She also has a lot to say about the modern Romans ("Their voices carry like rockets .. . An American ... feels exposed . .."). And she tries very hard to evoke the past in her description of Hadrian's ruined villa at Tivoli...
Last week, as another strenuous holiday season closed, two customs seemed marked for uprooting. Roman Catholic priests and lay organizations denounced the Christmas tree and Santa Claus as "pagan and Anglo-Saxon." The crèche and the Three Kings, they suggested, are more truly Latin. By & large, Mexican fathers, cracking under the strain of two gift days, backed the drive to cast out U.S.-style celebrations. Said one: "I can't afford any more to be Santa and the Three Kings, so my wife and I decided in favor of the Three Kings." That settled, he went downtown...