Word: apt
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...mosaic, a piece of sculpture, a tapestry or a painting is apt to be expensive, and it is certainly not functional. Thus when it comes to public projects or low-cost housing, watchdogs of the public purse tend to consider such fine arts frivolous and hard to justify to the taxpayers. A good many enlightened people deplore this view, but cannot make themselves felt. But a few years ago, an enlightened Philadelphia lawyer named Michael von Moschzisker found himself in a position to do something about it. He was then chairman of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, which was charged with...
...Apartheid (apartness) is one of the few Boer words any well-informed American is apt to recognize. But what it's like is less familiar. And just why it applies to swimmers three miles out tells another side of the Africa story. Also in THE WORLD...
...modern taste, which feels uneasy in the presence of any kind of heroics, West's highly polished portraits are apt to seem his most appealing work. But as he wrote to his pupil Charles Willson Peale, "I am not friendly to the indiscriminate waste of genius in portrait painting." He wanted to "dignify man," to pass on lessons of "religion, love of country and morality." To the classic pursuit of the ideal, he added a romantic love of exalted sentiment. And this suited Georgian England perfectly: when men passed West's dramatic Death of Lord Nelson, they doffed...
High comedy is often compared to the dance, but few performances justify that analogy with the grace that this one musters. Miss Cross, who began her career here as a choreographer, has blocked this production like a ballet. Her most apt pupil, David Gullette (Feste) capers and leaps about in endless motion. He and Adrienne Harris (Maria) continually struck just the right pitch of lightness...
...poems describe it better than any the critics can invent. Poetry, he said, "must almost resist intelligence." Only Randall Jarrell knows when he's licked: "Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around," he writes in perhaps the book's most apt judgment. Characteristic of Stevens' artful use of assonance and word-echoes to make a little something out of nothing much, is a stanza from "The Ordinary Women...