Word: archaicism
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...flunked" my Cambridge entrance in Latin the first time and "barely squeaked" in on the second [Dec. 22]. The truth is that I managed it the first time, as anyone with the merest suggestion of intelligence could. At the level required, the subject matter is necessarily restricted to archaic absurdities that can no longer inspire the young mind, if they ever could: "The sailors sacrifice the bull on the altar of the immortal gods!" This is the sort of bull we have got to be prepared to sacrifice...
...France Presse correspondent reported through censorship "lively discontent . . . The man on the street has difficulty understanding why he is being sacrificed for the benefit of the peasants." Observers offered a number of reasons: Red China is exporting about 2,000,000 tons of grain a year; China's archaic and anarchic transportation system, being rebuilt by the Reds, is bogged down lugging pig iron for the nation's new steel industry; the bureaucracy is making a mess of distribution. Last month the people of Canton, who live next to a sea of fish, could get no fish; Shanghai...
...four years Director John Meliades has been rearranging and patching together ancient fragments. His special prides are a 6th century Kore and the 5th century Nike (opposite), contrasting pinnacles of the Greeks' swift transition from archaic power to classical refinement...
Present fashion has partly reverted to the archaic, preferring the Kore to the Nike. To devotees of abstract art, the Kore seems the less fussy and closer to the "pure form" of modern sculptors such as Brancusi and Henry Moore. Yet the Kore's abstract balance is physical and intensely feminine too. She bulges the stone, breathing, and smiles from her cliff of self most tenderly. The Nike (Victory) has greatness of another order: she moves like a swirl of gauze and a body both, proudly displaying the lightness of spirit-filled flesh. She is the archaic maid...
Happy Burial. The Kore and other archaic statues were preserved by a happy chance of Greek history. In 480 B.C., invading Persians broke up the Acropolis statuary. But the Persians were defeated and turned back in Themistocles' great naval victory of Salamis. Returning, the Greeks piously buried the fragments of the sacred statuary on the Acropolis itself...