Word: avidity
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Accustomed to the dissipations of years of destruction, temperate men have become gluttonous, calm men avid, honest men robbers and even the best of men dishonest. Usury and appropriation is practiced under the name of business, and under the insignia of large industry a small group is engaged in.pirating against the public. . . . The ostentation of the rich has convinced everybody that nothing counts in this Heaven- estranged earth but money and what can be bought and wasted with money...
...theatrical managers have seized upon this national wave of immoral curiosity. They now have three ways (if one is to judge by fallible experience) of catching the communal eye of an avid but selective public. One is the judicious compound of the Semitic and the Hibernian*; another is the conservative use of the name Shakespeare; the third is the extravagant employment of courteous incontinence...
Pictures are drawn for the avid imaginations of magazine readers of tiny citizens absurdly caparisoned in velvet and plumes waiting daily for a director who requires the patter of little feet about the house to motivate his final clinch. Though there are laws which insist upon the education of movie children, we are led to believe that the education is scattered thinly through sessions before the blinding Kleig lights and interrupted by the hammering of carpenters and the yammering of stars...
...even in the deep-loined West. He is quoted as saying: "The way Western young folk go after belles-lettres almost suggests that the support of literature in the future will come from those parts." It is a striking picture that the professor draws; this lust for learning this avid, eager eating up of elegance, this relentless pursuit of the humanities. With exultant whoops the Western young folks gulp minor poetry and major essays, studies, sketches, belles-lettres, no more than the snow leopard, the wildcat and lynx, can escape them. As the professor says, they "go after belles-lettres...