Word: backwards
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...campus, he claims, innovation and creativity have been subordinated to abstruse research, cranked out to satisfy doctoral requirements or a department chairman's notions of what will advance the discipline. As one proof, the author recalls a Modern Language Association project in which 18 scholars read Tom Sawyer backward to avoid being caught up in the story while they checked how often "Aunt Polly" is written as "aunty Polly...
...setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised a 5,000-letter statement that read the same backward and forward. Its subject: palindromes. And four years before he died of cancer, Perec published La Vie Mode d'Emploi, a novel that French critics have increasingly hailed as a masterpiece...
...Stephen Cohen, however, called Gorbachev's performance a "major speech" that "attacked the entire mythology of Stalin." Said Cohen: "Gorbachev showed that he is absolutely defiant, but embattled. He's protecting himself because he's regarded by his critics as a zealot. But he didn't take a step backward...
Cleary: "Ugh. That makes it twice as tough. Oh, boy, it does terrible things to the hair line. Which reminds me of a joke. What do you call a bunch of rabbits walking backward? A receding hare line...
Altogether, Huntington concluded, by "conducting the proper mixture of reform, reassurance and repression, sliding two steps forward and dodging one step backward, where necessary playing on fear and employing deception," would-be South African reformers could eventually bring "into existence a new system of political institutions and thus give renewed life to their country...